hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is
the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by
the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing
accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many
countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a
novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of
fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil
government and civilization--as the elder politicians express it when
their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.
The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the
subject to give a university course in the various forms which social
insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York
School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.
After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social
necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the
activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be
provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share
the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved--as in various
types of non-contributory insurance.
Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not
relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged
to insure with a private corporation. The author's answer is that, even
if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A
man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small
premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk
involved would warrant--larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of
the business of the insurance company. But the poor man's chances of
loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in
proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never
afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care
of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his
earnings--and even then he might die before he reached it.
The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained
unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members
of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of
insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to
American practice is the burden of the present work.
The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no
extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea;
but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social
insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty--the aspects in
which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the
vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.
LLEWELLYN JONES.
Prose Poems of Ireland
Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]
If you believe, with Chesterton, that "should the snap dragon open its
little pollened mouth and sing 'twould be no more wonderful a thing"
than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy
red-breasted bird; if you are of "the young men that dream dreams" or of
"the old men who have visions" the songs and the tales and the
wanderings and the mysteries of "Red" Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with
a sense of your real nearness to "something lovelier than Heaven."
Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has
gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal
matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have
never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet,
and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp
the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at
dusk--regardless of the optician's orders.
H. B. S.
To William Butler Yeats
MARGUERITE O. B. WILKINSON
As one, who, wandering down a squalid street,
Where dingy buildings crowd each other high,
Where all who pass have need to hurry by,
Saddened and parched and fighting through the heat,
Comes suddenly where pain and beauty meet,
And sees a stretch of fair, unsullied sky,
Covering a field of clover bloom, so I,
With heart prepared to find the contrast sweet
In seeking through a world of sordid prose,
Where use-stained words with huddled shoulders stand
In sullen, monumental, loveless rows,
Have found a sudden green and sunny land
Where you, O Poet, give us back lost wonder,
Leisure, sweet fields, clean skies to travel under!
Sentence Reviews
[Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended
notice.]
The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York], will be
reviewed at length in the July issue.
Clay and Fire, by Layton Crippen. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] A
provocative philosophical discussion of the basal problem of religion by
an author who treats pessimism according to the homeopathic principle.
Reasonable hopes are made to seem hopeless. A morbid retrospectiveness
may, however, force thought into light, and the book leaves one in a
strange illumination effected by spiritual fire.
At the Sign of the Van, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.] These essays include The Log of the Papyrus with Other Escapades
in Life and Letters. Whether he is praising Percival Pollard, explaining
Whitman's cosmic consciousness--which he did to a Whitman Fellowship
gathering--or wistfully telling us how he would like to have had a look
in on the doings in Babylon, the amorous dallyings which Jeremiah
muckraked in the name of his Comstockean Jehovah, Michael Monahan is
always interesting even if he is not always as stormy as his designation
"the stormy petrel of literature" would indicate. In truth it would take
a number of birds of different species--but all pleasant ones--to make
up the tale of the qualities which this versatile essayist exhibits in
these pages.
Aphrodite and Other Poems, by John Helston. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.] Mr. Helston does not write great poetry,--though he comes close
to very good poetry at times,--but he writes greatly about love. His
attitude is a refusal to divorce the spiritual from the earthly with
which we have a hearty sympathy. No franker love poetry has been
written, probably; but somehow we failed to find in it the sensuality
that its critics have discovered. It is richly pagan.
Love of One's Neighbor, by Leonid Andreyev. [Albert and Charles Boni,
New York.] A very excellent translation of a one-act play which will
probably sell well, though coming from the author of The Seven Who Were
Hanged it seems a mere trifle. The translator, Thomas Seltzer, should be
urged to undertake the more worthy task of introducing Andreyev's really
great work to English-speaking readers.
New Men for Old, by Howard Vincent O'Brien. [Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.] The first novel of a new young writer, especially when he is as
sincere as Mr. O'Brien and as deeply interested in the joy of Work, is a
matter of importance. The book has its obvious faults technically, even
psychologically, but it preaches socialism from an interesting
standpoint and makes good reading.
Challenge, by Louise Untermeyer. [The Century Co., New York.] Virile and
ambitious songs of the present. Caliban in the Coal Mines, Any City,
Strikers, In the Subway, The Heretic, show that the poet is not a
shrinker from modern life. The title poem sounds the keynote:
The quiet and courageous night,
The keen vibration of the stars
Call me, from morbid peace, to fight
The world's forlorn and desperate wars.
John Ward, M.D., by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
Seneschal sentimentality with a "modern" plot woven about the
questionable science of eugenics. One of those irritating books in which
one reads page after page after page in the vain endeavor to find out
why Mitchell Kennerly spent his money on it.
Forum Stories, selected by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
All these stories have appeared in The Forum since it came under Mr.
Kennerley's management, and they are all by American writers. They
represent the work not only of such well known writers as Reginald
Wright Kauffman, James Hopper, Margaret Widdemer, and John S. Reed--who
has a tense little narrative of the struggle toward land of two swimmers
wrecked in the Pacific Ocean--but the work of several lesser known but
promising authors. Among them is Miss Florence Kiper, of Chicago, who
writes under the title I Have Borne My Lord a Son a most penetrating
study of the psychology of motherhood.
Papa, by Zoë Akins. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A little play which
shows so much determination to be clever and very, very naughty that
it's almost a pity it doesn't succeed.
Saint Louis: a Civic Masque, by Percy MacKaye. [Doubleday, Page and
Company, New York.] A valuable contribution to the dramatic "spirit" of
awakening civic intelligence.
Great Days, by Frank Harris. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Audacious,
vivid, gripping sex experiences of the son of an immoral English
innkeeper. The big rough brother of Three Weeks.
Poems, by Walter Conrad Amberg. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
Poems written with a sure and gentle delicacy that seems forgotten by
this generation of rude iconoclasts.
The True Adventures of a Play, by Louis Evan Shipman. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] The play is D'Arcy of the Guards and its author
tells in full the trials and tribulations--and the eventual
triumph--which met him from the moment when he offered to submit the
manuscript to E. H. Sothern, and that star told him to send it along.
Not only are the details of acceptances of plays, the incidental
negotiations and red tape described, but the making of costume plates,
the designing of the whole presentation, and the collaboration between
author, producer, and actors are told with such humor and documentary
fidelity to the actual transactions that the book will not only be
interesting to the general reader but indispensable to the tyro
playwright.
Nova Hibernia, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
Competent, incisive studies, sketches, and lectures dealing with "Irish
poets and dramatists of today and yesterday"--Yeats, Synge, Thomas
Moore, Mangan, Gerald Griffin, Callahan, Doctor Maginn, Father Prout,
Sheridan, and others.
The Pipes of Clovis, by Grace Duffie Boylan. [Little, Brown, and
Company, Boston.] A forester's son proficient on a magic pipe; a blue
and silver-gowned princess; the invasion of Swabia by the Huns away back
in the twelfth century, all woven into a romance for children and
grown-ups who still love the fairies.
The Post Office, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.] A touching little idyll of a sick child who longs for a letter
from the king through the post office which he can see across the road.
And his dream comes true. Written in rhythmic prose.
Sanctuary, by Percy MacKaye. [Frederick A. Stokes, New York.] A bird
masque performed in September, 1913, for the dedication of the bird
sanctuary of the Meriden Bird Club at Meriden, N. H. A defense of birds
and a defense of poetry. The theme is the conversion of a bird
slaughterer. The verse is full of "birdblithesomeness."
Old World Memories, by Edward Lowe Temple. [The Page Company, Boston.]
The story of a summer vacation in Europe as naïve, as full of human
interest, disjoined history, and worthy indefinite advice as the after
dinner "post card tour" of a just-returned Cook's traveler.
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