The fifth volume of The New Survey of London Life and Labour and The Unemployed Man are two books which deal with opposite aspects of life among the working classes in London to-day. The former describes the employed working man and relates the conditions of his employment, his wages and mode of living. The latter gives an account of the man without a job, the psychological reaction upon him of his position and the effect of the system of Unemployment Insurance in mitigating his pitiful state.

The New Survey of London Life and Labour is a modern version of the great survey initiated by Charles Booth in 1886, the results of which fill seventeen volumes under the general title of Life and Labour of the People in London. This grand inquest had revealed the horrible fact that during a period of unrivalled national prosperity as many as thirty per cent, of the inhabitants of London— more than a million men, women and children—were living at or beneath the bare level of subsistence. This discovery and the other revelations which emerged from Charles Booth’s survey had a very pressing influence on subsequent social legislation. And to anyone acquainted with the social work of the last thirty years the importance of such a survey in estimating the necessity and incidence of reform must be too evident to require emphasis. The method of investigation employed by Booth was, for those days, exceptionally scientific, but the technique made use of in compiling the New Survey is of a kind to give more accurate results.

Those who are familiar with the writings of M. Jacques Maritain will remember his summary of the ancient and mediaeval teaching upon art. The foundation of these doctrines was tha distinction between the speculative and the practical reason. In the first category were placed philosophy and pure science, in the second, action and making. Any man seeking knowledge, directing his actions or making objects, was equipped for his task by a habitus, a virtue which (perfecting and directing his natural gifts) could be perfected itself by correct training and right use.

The maker, artist, or artisan, working in matter, gave it a shape or form already conceived in his mind. The genesis and perfection of this spiritual form depended upon the end in view, the degree of habitus in the artist and his sincerity in the use of his gift. The form once achieved, the difficult work of individualising it in matter demanded skill, discipline, technique. The end and principle of the whole operation, however, was the intellectual form without which no art was possible. The genesis of the form requiring a true intellectual habitus, a right appreciation of the end in view; the shaping of the matter demanding a just estimate of its possibilities and an adequate ordering of the means to the end, it is clear the basis of the classical theory of making is the reason. Reason being the distinctive mark of man, we may qualify this doctrine as essentially human.

In 1850 John Henry Newman wrote: ‘Even when I was a boy, my thoughts were turned to the early Church, and especially to the early Fathers, by the perusal of the Calvinist John Milner’s Church History, and I have never lost, I have never suffered a suspension of the impression, deep and most pleasurable, which his sketches of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine left on my mind. From that time the vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, may say, a paradise of delight to the contemplation of which I directed my thoughts from time to time, whenever I was free from the engagements proper to my time of life.’

Brought up as an Evangelical, he studied the Fathers through Protestant spectacles even as late as his twenty-eighth year, when he was already under the influence of Whately and beginning to reach out to idea of a National Church with teaching powers and Sacraments. So he tells us:

‘When years afterwards (1828) I first began to read their works with attention and on system, I busied myself much in analysing them, and in cataloguing their doctrines and principles; but when I had thus proceeded very carefully and minutely for some space of time, I found, on looking back on what I had done, that I had scarcely done anything at all; I found that I had gained very little from them, and I came to the conclusion that the Fathers I had been reading, who were exclusively those of the ante-Nicene period, had very little in them. At the time I did not discover the reason of this result, though, on the retrospect, it was plain enough: I had read them simply on Protestant ideas, analysed and catalogued them on Protestant principles of division, and hunted for Protestant doctrines and usages in them.

As Mr. Hannen Swaffer said some time ago, they are using Art to sell Beauty. The remark was made, I believe, on the subject of the enlightened and progressive windowdressing of the shops in Regent Street, but it applies to quite a large number of things. In the first place, the capital ‘A’ recalls the unfortunate incident described by Anatole France, where the man who had learnt all the Art in the world was suffocated in his own catalogue.

The problem which is called, very impressively, the Adjustment of Art and Life, and which, in theory, has been solved over and over again, is, in practice, the subject of the most discouraging caricature. In spite of intelligent window dressing, of fine buildings and bridges, the ultimate comment, it seems, should be ‘they are using Art to sell Beauty.’

Mr. Gill, with his classical and impersonal precision, again gives us light on the subject.

A hundred years ago eight .young law-students of the Sorbonne gathered in the back room of a Paris newspaper office. Tired of decrying the low ebb to which the Faith had fallen in the chaos of the preceding half-century they had decided to put their hopes to the test of action. Under the patronage of St. Vincent de Paul, whose indefatigable zeal for the poor was not yet forgotten, they constituted themselves into a lay confraternity with the object of achieving their own sanctification through charitable works. Their rule was perfectly simple, in its first article it welcomes all young men anxious to unite in prayer and good work, in the second it states that no work of charity may be regarded as foreign to the aims of the society.

From this modest beginning the Society has grown from strength to strength, so that in May of this year representatives of provincial Councils from the four comers of the earth met in Paris to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the foundation. Instead of merely stirring the youth of France to a proper sense of its responsibility, the Society has come to be one of the most active spiritual organisations for Catholic laymen, and as such perhaps the best example of social action in modem times. Yet because its work is done unobtrusively, it is not as well known as it deserves to be outside the humble homes which enjoy its special care. Yet in the course of a hundred years of diligent activity the society has increasingly shown its ability to cope with the multifarious problems which are not and cannot be dealt with directly by the Church.

A Girl sat alone in Room No. 10 of the Hotel du Corbeau. From the window she could hear a rush of movement and voices, a perpetual, driving rhythm; it was the Rhine. Nothing could be seen except high fortifications and one or two sentries on guard. But the girl waited by the window, listening.

She was used to listening. For more than three years, she had seen none of the events around her, only heard sounds and guessed at their meaning. Now, as she listened to the river, it became the beating of drums and the ringing of the tocsin and the shouting of words which she tried in vain to catch. The old, sickening agony swept over her. Would no one tell her the news? Why wouldn’t they let her go to her mother? And where was her aunt Elisabeth? Then she seemed to be with her mother, aunt, and brother again. It was a shivering January morning, and they could hear from below the barred window, as she now heard from the river, the cry of ‘Execution of Capetel’ But the noise of the river swelled out, growing mad, exultant, and hateful, till it became the noise of the mob one day in September. ‘Mon Dieu, Madame, it is the head of the Princesse de Lamballe that they are carrying!’ Through the confusion, she could still hear those words and see her mother’s face turn into a senseless mask.

The centenary of the Oxford Movement brings to mind Robert Stephen Hawker, the High Church clergyman and poet who lived right through the hey-day of the Movement entirely unaffected by it, and was received into the Catholic Church on his death-bed. He is the subject of one of the most entertaining of biographies, The Vicar of Morwenstow, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, which was published in 1876, the year after Hawker’s death. Baring-Gould was a Devonshire High Church parson and squire. He wrote the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ three or four good novels, and a number of books on West Country traditions and antiquities. He had a huge appreciation of unusual characters and was the ideal biographer for so altogether striking a character as Mr. Hawker.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born at Plymouth in 1804. In his boyhood and youth he had a reputation as a dangerous practical joker. Baring-Gould relates several of the tricks that he played which are classics of their kind. Along with this exuberance he had a religious and poetical mind. At the age of seventeen he issued his first poems in a little book called ‘Tendrils by Reuben.’ He proceeded to the University of Oxford and was destined for the Anglican ministry. When he was twenty the family finances were involved in some misfortune and his career was almost wrecked for lack of means. As soon as he heard what had happened, Robert, who was at home, rushed off and proposed to an old friend of his, a Miss I’Ans, who was forty years old and who had a considerable income. She accepted him. He was able to continue his studies and the marriage was happy and successful.

A modern proverb has arisen as a star to guide the erring artist: ‘Look after Truth and Goodness, and Beauty will look after herself.’ But let the artist beware. Such a star may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. At first sight the proverb appears to contain the complete ethic for aesthetics, reducing the tough problem of beauty to a simple and practical formula. How attractive to unite the Good and the True in holy wedlock and then turning discover Beauty the bridesmaid carrying the train behind. Simplifications, however, have their dangers. To bring them in touch with reality requires such care that in practice they become most complex, disclosing many an attractive but misleading view. A simplification should only be the completion of thought, never the commencement. For Mr. Gill this proverb has come as the answer to a long process of reasoning, as appears from this volume. He thus avoids the only serious pitfall. But other artists who begin with this motto may not be so fortunate.

Truth belongs to the mind, goodness to the will, and beauty is the fruit of both the mind and the will. Any being in its perfection will be true in its correspondence to God’s idea of it; it will be good in its dependency on God’s will; and will be beautiful in its reflection of the harmony of God’s mind and will, which have produced the first two effects. Therefore beauty follows necessarily from the truth and goodness of a thing. Concentration on the first and the second produces the third automatically, since it is nothing less than the harmony between those two.

It is a relief to turn from the apocalyptic literature, so prevalent to-day, to a book whose purpose is to indicate the elements which make for reconstruction and order in one of the basic activities of human life. Its author, the retiring President of the Headmasters’ Conference, is the head of a great school in one of the most ancient and traditional cities of this country. We need not, therefore, be on our guard against a fanatic of modernity for its own sake; and, in fact, the most striking quality of his book is the breadth and sanity of its outlook, a deep appreciation of the great things of the past with a live awareness of what is vital and sincere in our own time. ‘The affectation of despising the old masters is not less dangerous than the opposite error of looking back on art as something embedded in a lost culture, like a fly in amber. Art is continuous, and genuine modernity is not a denial, but only a fresh application in new circumstances, of eternal principles bequeathed to us by the art of all ages .... The real lover of art finds no incompatibility between new and old. His exciting consciousness of his own age, as a creative renaissance, only whets his appetite for the best fruits of archaeological research and discovery.’ The book has a further merit. There are plenty of monographs dealing with the modern manifestations of this or that art, such as Mr. Casson’s works on sculpture and Mr. Roger Fry’s on painting. No one would question their value or their legitimacy, but by the very fact that they treat each subject in isolation they continue to uphold the illusion that art is something apart and remote from normal human life. But Mr. Barton succeeds in making us realise that, in the past, art was integrated in the whole social life of the community and that it must be so again if we are to achieve a true civilisation.

It may be truly said that many years before Dr. Johnson’s death, he had obtained the universal respect of his fellow-countrymen. And this esteem continued for at least a generation after he had passed away, for had not the genius of his great biographer ‘Johnsonized the land’? However, later on there came a time, and one that lasted long, when his fame suffered an eclipse, and that almost total. Romanticism and a new Liberalism were now sovereign; Byron and Scott, Wordsworth and Shelley, these were men’s gods; there was no place for the sturdy common-sense of Johnson. But to-day this movement has more or less run its course, and by an inevitable reaction Dr. Johnson has come into his own again. There is a general revival of interest in him, his circle, and his period, and that not only in England, but very markedly in America also. Societies are founded to study his works and his opinions. New editions of Johnson and Boswell, with careful and meticulous commentaries and annotations, issue from the press. Every detail is scanned, every morsel of interest is brought to light. Collections of letters and sayings are published. Essays are written, meetings are held, speeches are delivered, literary repositories are ransacked, manuscripts are unearthed and collated, and transatlantic millionaires bear down upon our auction-rooms and at incredible cost secure rich Johnsonian prizes.

Amidst the welter of memoirs of the Napoleonic era De Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires always seems to me to hold a peculiar charm and attraction. The very opening sentence of the book strikes that keynote of gentle melancholy and disillusion which is so characteristic of the high-souled Captain Renaud with his famous Canne de Jonc. ‘ If it is true, according to the Catholic poet, that there is nothing so painful as remembering happy days in the midst of misery, it is also true that the heart finds a certain happiness in recalling times of hardship and slavery, in a period of freedom and calm.’ This same air of philosophic detachment and experienced judgment pervades all the author’s reflections on the rottenness of the military system of the age and the hollowness of military glory. Incidentally the book contains also in the story of Laurette ou le Cachet Rouge, one of the tenderest and most poignant love-stories ever written.

In the course of the Captain’s memoirs there stand out in clear detachment the portraits of two of the leading protagonists in the great struggle for supremacy, one of the Emperor himself, the other of the most chivalrous and high-souled of all England’s naval commanders, the illustrious Admiral Collingwood.

The above title may cover a wide field of social problems and of social legislation. Indeed, modern society, faced with a very complex social situation arising from a highly developed economic structure, has built up a system of laws, hardly less complex than the social conditions they were intended to deal with. Yet despite factory acts, social insurance schemes, and trade union law, the existing English law is insufficient to deal with the industrial problems of the present time. Some measures are necessary to alter the legal status of labour and of industrial relations. Although practical steps along these lines have beert frequently discussed at the meetings of Royal Commissions, and although some proposals of this nature have actually been realized in various English industries, the subject is still unfamiliar to the English public. Yet great importance is attached to such a way of social reform in other countries and considerable success has been achieved by it in Italy and Germany. While in the former of these two countries trade unions and employers’ organizations have become mere instruments of the State—a solution hardly acceptable in a country like England—in Germany there developed after the war a well-balanced Labour Law of whose particular characteristics many may recommend themselves to people in this country. We will therefore describe the status of Labour and of industrial relations as created by the new German Labour Law, comparing it with conditions in England.

From whatever angle the Oxford Movement is examined, it is impossible to disregard the spirit of alarm which informed its opening phase. Reforms long overdue were beginning to take effect; further reforms of a more searching character were to follow. Outworn institutions and rusty machinery could not remain untouched when the national spirit was demanding radical developments in political and social institutions. Excluding a small body of the clergy, Englishmen of all ranks within and without the Established Church regarded that body and its ministers as an institution dependent for its existence upon the Body Politic. For them the Church of England was little more than a State Department; and in common with the rest this too must submit to the reforms which it urgently required.

Since the days of Elizabeth the National Church had been immediately sensitive to every political development: each successive crisis had struck it violently and left deep scars. With the termination of the Stuart period and the rejection of ‘Divine Right,’ the great days of Caroline High Churchmanship had come to an end. The High Church party as an effective power died within the Church, whilst the Non-Juring Sect languished into insignificance from lack of an object. The volumes of Caroline divinity remained untouched on the library shelves: theological interests, rules of Christian Perfection and Sacramental Doctrine had become unfashionable.

When Russia fell under Bolshevik rule in 1917 it appeared as if a civilization had passed away. In 1919, when Fascism appeared in Italy, it seemed at first that this was but another form of Communism, but by 1926 it was clear that Fascism was making good, and the reconciliation with the Holy See in 1929 established it as the great political idea of the age. To-day it is permeating society. The U.S.A. and Germany are Fascist in principle, if not in name. Catholic Austria has set up a Fascist government. Ireland is fast approaching the same position, and a Fascist Party has been established in France. We may well ask ourselves what this Fascism is, and how it has succeeded so quickly in capturing the great nations of the world, with the exception of Great Britain.

The first thing to note is that Fascism and Communism have succeeded in Italy and Russia because their leaders believed in the soundness of their principles and had the courage to put them into practice. The root idea of Fascism is Action, and therefore it is the opposite of Parliamentarianism, which is founded on Debate. Debate is perhaps a satisfactory form of procedure when a landed oligarchy is the dominating power in society, and when the opposing parties have common interests in preserving this power, but when real control has passed into the hands of those who have no stake in the country, and parties have arisen which are opposed on the fundamental question of the form of society itself, it is an impossible position.

The life of Mr. Middleton Murry as told by himself in the early part of his book on God is moving and tragic; tragic, not only because of the temperamental difficulties which made his relations with his wife, Katherine Mansfield, so painful both to him and to her, not only because of her sudden though not unexpected death, but because his own character is such that he seems to have spent most of his life in a state of spiritual darkness, struggling to find a gleam of light, and yet, by some strange psychological perversity, shutting his eyes when the light appeared. He has studied the Gospels. The sayings of Christ fall from his pen as easily as from the lips of a fervent Christian. But he is not a Christian (though he has said in the Scots Observer that he counts himself one), for he rejects Christ’s claim to be divine. He is not even a theist, for he has written in so many words ‘God does not exist’ (God, p. 233). Yet he looks upon himself as a mystic. ‘We mystics, we fanatics! Yes, that is true .... Out of our serene impartiality, out of our final loss of all illusion, arises mysticism, arises fanaticism.’ (The Necessity of Communism, pp. 113-4).

Dr. Kidd’s book on the Counter-Reformation is at once a delight and a disappointment. It is a delight because of the skill with which a wealth of knowledge and historical insight, together with a strong sympathy with the Catholic mentality of the sixteenth century, have been compressed and woven into the lucid, scholarly narrative of 262 pages. It is a disappointment because the author's strict following of the conventional treatment of the Counter-Reformation and his attempted adherence to an artificial chronological terminus ad quem, have prevented him from seeing all round his subject and from shedding any really new illumination upon it. Like most of his predecessors he begins with spirituality and ends with politics. At the beginning it is the Oratory of Divine Love, the new Orders, the Exercises, that confront the reader; at the end it is the details of wars, plots, and dynastic policies that hold the attention. The inevitable implication is not wholly justified. Though Dr. Kidd naturally sees that the Counter Reformation was more than a mere reaction of medievalism against Protestantism, he is writing at the end as if the classification of territories lost or won, and by what external agencies, were the whole of his business. On any adequate interpretation of the Counter-Reformation— by which I mean one that recognizes in it a positive and potentially self-sufficient internal development of Catholicism, in touch with all the new forces of the sixteenth century, though undeniably much stimulated and indeed gravely modified by the fight against Protestantism; on any such interpretation, surely, for example, that wonderful and much studied flowering of French Catholicism in the early seventeenth century is as much, if not more, of its essence than the Wars of the League?

The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.

At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’