More Books of the Week
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A thoughtful and stimulating essay conies to us in the shape of Miss Storm Janieson's The Decline of Mem England (Cassell, 10s. 6d.). This book is a study of the development of individualism, which the upspringing of Puritanism encouraged and which in the latter end has resulted in the complete divorce of religion from economics and in the establishment of, on the one side, capitalism and large-scale production, and, on the other, of (in Mr. Tawney's words) " a massed proletariate of propertyless wage-earners." We want, pleads the author by implication, a return to the ideals of world which regarded the religious or moral, the intellectual and the economic spheres as one. Doubtless that there was plenty of capitalism in Catholic Venice or Catholic Flanders of the fifteenth century, but the Church still maintained an influence, and economics were not wholly secularized. It was reserved for the commercial classes of Protestant England, asserting themselves against what Mr. Belloc calls popular monarchy and finally executing its representative, to work towards the full blooming of the Hower of capitalism, not necessarily or solely, however, because England was Protestant. Economic utilitarianism reigned and still endures. Happiness may possibly return, when we believe more in co-operation and less, if at all, in liberty." The author is to be congratulated on the production of a sincere and well-documented book. •
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