An Economic Markham -
Life and Work in England. By Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher. (Arnold. 3s.) CHILDREN'S books, like their diet, seem to be improving a good deal. If we on our gross and casual food 'survived infancy, at
all, the pure milk and Orange'. juice andleonnted:vitaminS of the modern nursery should produce 'a race of supermen, with
streamline bodies and stainless teeth. And their iriinclg, too,
happy little creatures, are more intelligently fed:. It is now quite common to include a dose of economic and political
history (a mental vitamin unknown to schoolrooms before the War) in the future citizen's curriculum ; he or she may, and often does, leave school knowing that a bank is not only a tin money-box nor consumption a disease, and start life with some idea of the way in which the man in the street has developed from the man in the bog, or from the savage in the still virgin forest. .
Mrs. Fisher's little book is typical of many which are ready to the hand of young people nowadays, and which might well be borrowed by the average ignorant adult of a more stinted generation. It is not an easy task to present, in 200 odd pages, a " sketch of our social and economic history," and Mrs. Fisher has accomplished it very well.
Life and Work in England begins with the pre-Roman period in this island, and goes on to give a necessarily vague account of the elements which composed the English people. " Out of it all grew the English race, with its Celtic poetry - and romance and music, its English love of the country, its Danish skill in. trade, its Norse seamanship, its Norman method and capability in managing business and government." This may appear a little optimistic, in view of what Mrs. Fisher has to disclose about the later development of England ; but until the nineteenth century she gives an admirably lucid and detailed account of the major changes in the economic and social life of the country.
With the nineteenth century and the industrial revolution Liberalism creeps into the narrative ; the " Norman method and capability in managing busin6s and government " arc superseded without regret, and it is assumed that after the repeal of the Corn Laws everything was getting better and better in the best of all liberal worlds, until the Great War upset the most assured of its calculations. After the War neither events themselves nor Mrs. Fisher's account of them can be considered so satisfactory ; but she ends with the moderately sanguine sentence : " Our own contribution to (that) civilization, and our own well-being, depends upon how far we can continue to do what we have hitherto done with success, that is, adapt ourselves and our own ways of managing our affairs to new needs and -Co new conditions."
The book contains about seventy excellent illustrations of architecture, costume and life, many of' them taken from con- temporary prints, which are well worth the thirty pages or so of letterpress which they may be presumed to have excluded.
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