Welsh Journals

past. But it is only now being applied in the field of political and industrial actions. The Golden Age of General Elections and General Trade Union Meetings and Congresses is past. To leave things to the people is to leave things to a Camarilla. If there is hard thinking or high imagining to be done, a church to be founded, or a campaign to be planned, look for it, not in the vast assemblages to which modern life has accustomed us, but in the quiet of the upper room, where two or three are gathered together." A group that knows its own mind and can hold fast to its ideals, can transform the world. For such a group is not a mere collection of persons it is a new personality, compounded of the best and strongest of what is in each of them. This is as true to-day as it was 1900 years ago. This thought suggests a third influence, of which Mr. Cole's book bears manifold traces, that of the educational movement, which has in the last three years planted groups of working class students, bound together by the closest ties of comradeship and common study, in some 200 centres throughout England and Wales. Mr. Cole speaks somewhere of the labour movement in search of a Philosophy." But it is finding its thinkers, it is binding them together in a common work of self-expression, and ere long, not through laborious analysis, but by the contact of mind with mind and of theory with experience, Labour's Philosophy will spring forth-perhaps in writing, perhaps in action. The working-class has already created a new method and ideal of education, or rather it has taken from ancient Greece (or from the Welsh Sunday Schools), without knowing it, the method of the Platonic dialogue and the Philosophers ideal of continuous adult education. If the reader doubts it, let him take the first opportunity of visiting a University Tutorial Class. He will then understand the deep significance of Mr. Cole's description of group-action as the true principle of working-class solidarity, the creation of new individualities within the State" and as "the missing link between individualist and socialist theories, the one true basis of the general will." And he will also have before his mind's eye the University of the future-the University which is not either a finishing- school for young gentlemen or a preparation for the professions, but a school to which men and women may repair from the work-a-day world to ponder and compare their experiences in the light of know- ledge and mutual understanding, and to mould the ideas which will make the world of to-morrow. There is still another set of ideas which Mr. Cole shares with the younger school. Like the" sophists" of ancient Greece he measures everything by the human test. "Man is the measure of all things." What effect, he asks of any concrete system or proposal, will it have on the human life of men and women ? He judges life, in other words, not in terms of money or power or outward trappings, but in terms of life itself--of the life of the spirit. Indeed by his standard the wage-system cannot fail to stand condemned, for the very terms of the wage-contract by which a man surrenders control over the conditions in which his working life is spent, are a denial of that freedom which is the birthright of the soul. It is here, on his insistence that it is not so much the wages, as the whole conditions of wage-labour which are at fault, that Mr. Cole shows himself at once both a true disciple of classical Oxford and a revolutionary thinker. The Labour unrest to him is not a cry for bread and wages, a protest against poverty, but a cry of the soul for freedom, a protest against injustice. He knows that it is not only hunger and employment, but the subtler fears and forces summed up in the words overtime, victimisation, espionage, workshop tyranny, blacklisting, speeding-up, and the rest which are spurring the working-class to new philosophies and new programmes. There is plenty of philosophy in The World of Labour." There is a programme too, but it is somewhat truncated. But there is a sequel to follow at no distant date and even if there were not, there are students enough in the new University to supply the deficiencies. "WEALTH." Professor Cannan has himself reviewed most of the Economic text books of his time and the burden of his criticism has always been the same. Their authors fail to give the student a clear conception of the motive power and machinery of modern industry. They do not explain the actual economic operations of civilised society. They either overwhelm you with seven hundred pages on the theory of value to explain why a pencil costs a penny, or they rush into the middle of it and point out some nut or screw loose. No examiner" Dr. Cannan once wrote in an old number of the Economic Journal dare propose to put in a paper the question Why "Wealth." By Edwin Cannan, LLD.. Professor of Political Economy in the University of London. London: P. S. King and Son. Pp. 274. 3/6 net.