posterity produces it will consume and enjoy. By no ingenuity can we now take toll of the crops and output of 1950. By leaving a burden of war debt we can only affect the distribution of our descendants' output. But whether taxation or borrowing be the method chosen, the Government must be made to take our money from us individual consumers, so that we may be forced to consume less and set free The Economist.

all the nation's energy for war needs. If the war is to go on, as now seems possible enough, for another year or two, inflation cannot be allowed to infect our financial system worse and worse with its queasy flatulence. Its effect is financial conscription applied on the worst possible lines. If we are to have financial conscription, let it be honestly acknowledged and equitably carried out.

The plot of "Enoch Crane" is so slight that one thinks of it as more of a literary pudding than a novel. Perhaps its lack of structure is due to its having been planned by F. Hopkinson Smith and written by M. F. Berkeley Smith after his father's death; but after studying the ingredients one grows quite sure that it was designed for a pudding from the beginning. Here is the recipe: Let one careless, dashing young architect fall in love with a beautiful but penniless Southern girl. Add two garrulous, warmhearted, thoroughly servile darkies, a tiresome Yankee stepfather, a few blasé and immoral society people, and

and faced many risks in gathering the material for these sketches. It is not with the military movements that he is chiefly concerned, but with the social and industrial conditions, the Governmental press propaganda, the suppression of all free discussion, the military training of children, the utterances of pulpits of hate and of puppet professors, the lies disseminated on official films, the distressing food shortage, the anti-war demonstrations and the iron hand of the authorities upon the people. All these and other aspects of the present situation in Germany he describes vividly and intimately. The book brings to the reader a new revelation of things as they really are. From cover to cover, there is no dull or trivial chapter. In this year's war literature, there is no more important or illuminating book.

A book of thrilling eloquence and rare discernment is Thomas Whitney Surette's "Music and Life." A collection of essays, first published in The Atlantic Monthly and now remodeled, it takes up the music of America, for children, in the schools, in the community; then explains the opera and the symphony. An opening chapter on "What is Music?" will probably

be everywhere received as the most pregnant. It is illuminating. Mr. Surette feels that music is shoved back out of its rightful place in American life; that the same utilitarianism which today would fling the study of the classical languages, of art, even of English literature, out from the curriculum of the school, is pushing music to the wall. It is a thing for display at June graduation exercises, nothing more. So he holds up the proper study of song, before all else, as the educator of the higher emotions, even of patriotism. "The relation between music and life is an intimate and vital relation; SO everyone, that neither sings nor loves music, has robbed himself of life, is just so much poorer." The book is a noble plea for noble living. Houghton, Mifflin Co.

In "The Road to Understanding" Mrs. Eleanor H. Porter apparently intended to deal with the problem of incompatibility of temperament. Burke Denby, infatuated with the beauty of a young nursemaid, marries her in spite of his father's opposition. She soon reveals a shallowness and selfishness which transform love's young dream into an endless series of petty squabbles. John Denby finally separates them temporarily, in the fond hope that a short rest will make it possible for them to live happily ever after. Having skilfully aroused the reader's interest in the situation, Miss Potter slowly shatters it by her solution. Helen Denby stays away for nineteen years, until she is quite sure that she and her daughter have become such perfect ladies that Burke cannot help but love them! Then they return and fall on each other's necks, and we are left to infer that the results were quite satisfactory. The book is swathed in mists of emotion, sentiment, and vague idealism. They are obviously intended to cast a golden

glamour over it; but, instead, characters are reduced to dim outlines, the threads of the plot are obscured, and every figure in the story stumbles over many unnecessary obstacles. In spite of all this, the book holds one's interest when read for the first time, but when reread or even remembered, it is maddening. Houghton, Mifflin Co.

The action of Robert Chambers's latest novel, "The Dark Star," revolves about a set of duplicate plans of the fortifications at Gallipoli, entrusted for safe-keeping to an American missionary by a German secret agent in danger of his life. The missionary returns home, and the papers lie for fifteen years in a chest in a small mill village in New York, till his beautiful daughter, studying art in Paris, prattles of them in the hearing of a Turkish spy. A fascinating woman in the employ of Germany is dispatched to get possession of them; another fascinating woman, in the employ of Russia, cables to an American admirer to bring them to Paris forthwith-and the plot is fairly under way. Mr. Chambers's public will find this book quite up to their expectations. To the critical reader the most interesting page is the one on which the author expresses his opinion of a rival school of fiction: "One of those slobbering American novels which serve up falsehood thickly buttered with righteousness, and are consumed by the morally sterilized. . . . It was an 'uplift' book. . . . That most deadly reproach to degenerate human nature-the accidental fact of sex-had been so skilfully extirpated from those pages that, like chaste amoebae, the characters merely multiplied by immaculate subdivision, and millions of lineal descendants of the American Dodo were made gleeful for $1.50 net." But why so peevish, Mr. Chambers? D. Appleton & Co.