NA TURE 



1S1 



THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 



REC0NS1 A'/ < / ION. 



1918. 



National Reconstruction. I Study in Practical 

 Politics and Statesmanship. By j. J- Robinson. 

 Pp. x- 155. (London: Hursl and Blackett, 

 Ltd., 191S.) Prii e - s. 6d. net. 



RECONSTRUCTION," like Mesopotamia, is 

 a blessed word, and already there exists a 

 considerable literature to expound its illimitable 

 possibilities. The value of that literature is not 

 equal to its hulk, for the writers too often have 

 been misled by some passing phase of a rapidly 

 shifting situation, (ir are the victims of doctrinaire 

 theories or, worse, of "the Phrase," which Mr. 

 Robinson notes "is very real and oppressive just 

 now the artificial and captivating jingles which 

 are often made to do duty for facts and for reason- 

 ing from facts." If we had not enough already 

 of "the monstrous regiments ol people paid to get 

 other people to do things," there would be justi- 

 fication for .1 censor who would refuse to pass for 

 publication books on "reconstruction," unless they 

 were written by those who combined some train- 

 ing in disciplined thinking with adequate experi- 

 ence of administrative problems — the perennial 

 difficulty, in short, of achieving demonstrable pro- 

 gress by the machinery of institutions, working 



rid worked by, men and women as they really 

 are. The defects of the average administrator 

 and the limitation-, of machine^ are too commonly 



Men by those who assume in three hundred 

 and fifty pages that a new British Empire i an be 

 created by a crop of committees and an encyclo- 

 paedia of legislation in a few years "alter the 



war. " 



Mr. Robinson would pass the suggested 

 censor's test. His pages prove to a practised eye 

 that he has thought deeply and read widely, while 

 his administrative training has been varied and 

 prolonged. He has, then ion. a right to sum- 

 marise his experience. Moreover, he summarises 

 it concisely, with freshness of expression and a 

 stimulating conviction. Mr. Robinson certainly 

 does not pretend that the monopoly of truth is on 

 his writing-table, for he fully recognises that there 

 are seventy-seven ways of constructing tribal lays, 

 and that ever} single one of them is right. We 

 certainly wish that Mr. Robinson could lure into 

 "the school " where "he still is" as many poli- 

 ticians and voters, new and old, as possible and 

 keep them there until peace was signed, sealed, and 

 delivered. An old-fashioned parent once ascribed 

 the success of his sons and daughters to the con- 

 tinuity and impartiality of his discipline. "I 

 whipped my boys," lie said, "to knock sense into 

 them, and my twirls to knock nonsense out of 

 them." A course of Mr. Robinson would knock 

 much sense into, and much nonsense out of, the 

 young men and women who alone can be the 

 "reconstructors " of the Empire. The future of 

 "reconstruction" lies with the young, not with 

 the middle-aged or the old, paralysed by the igno- 

 2558, VOL. I02] 



ranee, apathy, and superstitions of five pre-war 

 generation. One of Mr. Robinson's best lessons 

 is that both the beginning and the end turn on the 

 individual, "the mobile and mobilisablc unit of 

 power" and if the unit fails we shall not even 

 muddle through. Some of the instruction that the 

 unit sorely needs can be found in Mr. Robinson's 

 pages, and also much of the inspiration to discover 

 more in life itself and in the inexhaustible poten- 

 tialities of disciplined individual character. 



It is not possible here to compress this valuable 

 little book into a tabloid which a reader of reviews 

 can swallow and imagine that he is thereby ab- 

 solved from any further effort. We take it that 

 the gist of Mr. Robinson's thesis is contained in 

 his remark : "The history of civilisation up to 1917 

 is the history of power in unfit hands"; and the 

 gist of his practical lesson is to show how "the 

 unfit hands" can be made fit. We are supposed 

 now to be on the eve of a General Election, the 

 results of which presumably will be to determine 

 by whom the work of "reconstruction" is to be 

 achieved in the next five years. It would be salu- 

 tary, indeed, if every candidate for Parliament and 

 every voter had at every meeting in the election 

 period to answer publicly in the presence of his 

 fellow-voters, male and female, the catechism 

 outlined in pp. 79-84 — salutary and most humili- 

 ating. That catechism expands, but not unduly, 

 the famous question: "If these things " (and we 

 all know what "these things" are, the ills, 

 mental, moral, physical, and social, from which we 

 all individually and corporately suffer) " are pre- 

 ventable, why are they not prevented? 



We shall not misinterpret Mr. Robinson's 

 "gospel " if we sum it up as a chain of proofs 

 that what reconstruction demands is not so much 

 a new theory of the State and citizenship as a 

 new type of citizen, in whom knowledge is the 

 teacher of duty, and duty the fruit of knowledge. 

 Finally, Mr. Robinson concludes with a warning, 

 so apposite and true and so often ignored that it 

 must be quoted : — 



"It may be difficult," he pronounces, "to get 

 general readers, or popular audiences, to realise 

 that Germany's intensive cultivation of war is 

 neither the most dangerous nor perhaps the most 

 considerable of her contributions to human experi- 

 ence and possibilities. . . . Surely it must be patent 

 that the modern German Army is but the child of 

 something more momentous. . . . Germans have 

 attempted and achieved a Germanism which, 

 after the war, will and must remain a perpetual 

 challenge to other nations more loosely organised, 

 less sternly schooled by the disciplinary education 

 Germany subjected herself to for national ends 

 . . . the German people will remain ... it will 

 not be met and mastered by anything less indus- 

 trious and. zealous than itself. By no machinery 

 of voting, or credence given to empirical igno- 

 rance, can the slothful, the ignorant, and the dis- 

 organised close the highways of the world against 

 the energetic, the educated, and the organised." 

 "Is it necessary," asks Mr. Robinson, "for the 

 moral to be the more stupid man? Is it possible 



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