SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots Books, Art, Drama By George Middleton ALREADY the desks and library shelves are being filled with books on the war and it is appalling to think that all this generation and the next...
...In this volume we have the record of a man who lost his eyesight early in life...
...As a former secretary of the Anglo-German Friendship Committee he writes with a saddened pen, protesting violently against the violation of Belgium neutrality...
...Henry Holt and Company have just arranged to take for America, and will publish in February...
...TURNING from these strenuous volumes to a little book like Hitting the Dark Trail (Holt) one is made doubly conscious of the great conflicts which each individual must fight...
...Perhaps it is so...
...It is the record of a triumph of "starlight through thirty years of night...
...for to me, the most constant source of astonishment is the capacity of human achievement...
...Perhaps it is a platitude to call attention to the analogy which always comes to mind when one realizes that in life there is constant combat and that our greatest conquests are over the spiritual problems which each of us has to face...
...When the history of this time is fully written I myself feel that there will be no small place given to those valiant women who went to protest against war...
...And the fact is that the author's idea of functional representation, though it may be called Utopian, is already struggling for recognition in our government, State and National, hampered though it is by what the author regards as outgrown and archaic forms...
...Though he writes as an Englishman, with the inevitable prejudices, his volume is recommended to those who may be interested in the technical phases of the war game...
...G. H. Perris' The Campaign of 1914 in France and Belgium (Holt) also contains much information along this same line though less technical...
...But it is so written as to make intensely interesting reading...
...It is a specific statement of the great low laws in the nature of man that have brought about his advancement in the past but that can carry him no higher, and of those more important newly known laws (outlined in this book) arising from his highest mental functions that should now be enacted and represented in his mental, civil and industrial life...
...Hilaire Belloc's The Elements of the Great War (Hearst's International Library) while rather academic at times coincides with the various books by Frank Simons...
...I know of no better book to keep one's optimism fresh...
...The complete series includes the following volumes by John Masefield: The Story of a Roundhouse, The Faithful, The Tragedy of Pompey...
...In the department of wealth Social Harmonism states those natural laws of ownership under which every human being is entitled to consume the equivalent of his value to the world—and no more—and that create conditions by which can be produced the greatest amount of happiness, of product and of life security...
...The book is one that cannot fail to compel the attention of everyone interested in the problems of government...
...It is vastly more than Bellamy's Looking Backward, reversed...
...Too often only the classics have been issued in this form but with the publication on September 2.9th, of the series known as The Macmillan Modern Poets, the writings of such men as John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters...
...Wister points out the glories of Germany as she was, yet bitterly condemns what he believes is the real meaning of the Prussian system...
...Yet, as most of the authors point out, the game of war is changing: new conditions have destroyed old systems and inventions have completely altered military strategy...
...He feels profoundly that we have a part in this war since the world is one and since Democracy is at stake...
...YOU MAY shortly have the work of your favorite modern poet bound in limp leather...
...Clarence Hawkes does not tell his story in any sentimental fashion...
...Perris has given a record of military history rather than a compilation of opinions concerning it...
...the Great, Philip the King and Other Poems, A Mainsail Haul, The Daffodil Fields, The Everlasting Mercy and Salt Water Ballads...
...The author has in addition many picturesque accounts of the battles coupled with his observations in Paris both before and during this first stage when the Teutons failed in their first great drive...
...Social Harmonism boldly asserts that government should specifically represent every faculty of the human mind by an elected officer having special ability in the administration of the laws of his or her own department...
...It is a book of hope, courage and achievement, for Mr...
...W. C. Scully, whose Ledges in the Wilderness Messrs...
...From a strategical point of view there are already enough volumes to please those who like to look upon this as a huge game of chess...
...In some ways Owen Wister's The Pentecost of Calamity (Macmillan) is one of the most notable literary productions which has yet been published...
...In a recent illuminating comment on this book, Gilbert Roe, author of Our Judicial Oligarchy, pointed out: "The idea that government must be divided into three departments—Executive, Legislative and Judicial—is one which we have inherited, and the proposal by the author of Social Harmonism to disregard it and nearly all other governmental traditions, relating to the form of government, will doubtless cause his book to be stamped as radical and revolutionary...
...Hawkes is a successful lecturer and novelist...
...It is too bad that an essay as sustained and lofty as this is in tone, no matter how one may agree or disagree with it, should have been marred with a slur upon the Woman's Peace Conference...
...No one can quite be free from all the inherited tendencies which go to tinge our minds...
...In some ways it is too early to place the war in any perspective, for we see it through our passions and prejudices...
...Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Vachel Lindsay's The Congo and Other Poems, Fannie Stearns Davis' Crack O'Dawn, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's three books, Fires, Daily Bread and Women-kind, Alfred Noyes' three books, Poems, The Golden Hynde and Other Poems and Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems, Lincoln Colcord's Vision of War, Sara Teasdale's Rivers to the Sea, Thomas Walsh's The Pilgrim Kings, and John G. Neihardt's The Song of Hugh Glass are also announced...
...THE Nebraska Equal Suffrage Campaign Committee sends word to the Woman's Journal: "The new campaign is on...
...SOCIAL HARMONISE, by Holmes W. Mer-ton and published by him ($1.50), is a practical science of human government...
...ONE of those rare and fortunate authors who have an idea how to write," is the comment of the London Times on Mr...
...Vachel Lindsay, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and others are now available in handsome leather bindings...
...In 1916 by legislative act, or in 1918 by initiative, the question of equal suffrage will be re-submitted and Nebraska men, then wiser and further on their way toward a realization of the motto of their state, ' Equality Before the Law,' will return the proper answer...
...Unlike Senator Beveridge's What Is Bach of the War (Bobbs Merrill) which tends to be pro-German, Mr...
...Scully was noted for many things when a British Rural Magistrate in South Africa, among others being a prize marksman, but that did not prevent his seeing and describing the desert like a poet, even when he did so in prose...
...Snap Shots Books, Art, Drama By George Middleton ALREADY the desks and library shelves are being filled with books on the war and it is appalling to think that all this generation and the next will be fed upon it...
Vol. 7 • December 1915 • No. 12
