BOOKS OF THE DAY•
Survival-Value of Liberty The Free State. By D. W. Brogan. (Hanush Hamilton. 65.) THIS excellent book is a defence of the Free State againsi those who think that liberty can be bartered for efficiency. Mr. Brogan does not believe in a passive defence under the shelter of historic Declarations of Right. Indeed, he is willing to abandon a good many positions once thought necessary for the defence of democracy, and to meet the enemy by attack with modern and unexpected weapons. One might use all the current military terms—paratroops, fighter-bombers, bazookas, and what not—to describe these sorties.
Such tactics are interesting as well as successful. It may be said that political philosophy in Great Britain has been a dull subject only during those periods when the philosophers were weighted down by the labouring terminology of the Germans. The Germans ..clo not overawe Mr. Brogan. He shows them up, and in the process gives a number of very sound reasons why the Free State has more chances of survival than any other kind of state. These reasons are practical. They can be expressed in prancing terms or in ponderous terms, but they are based on observed facts about the nature of man and the character of the societies in which he lives.
It follows that Mr. Brogan is an optimist, at all events about democracies in which English or French or Dutch or a Scandinavian language is spoken. The decencies of life, the kindnesses and loyalties of ordinary men are not a splendid defiance of nature. They contribute to the survival of those states in which they are given a free field. One might add that in the Free State there is no "common man." The "common man" is a literary myth ; there are millions of different individuals whose happiness depends upon the expression of their individuality. Hence, in terms which now and then would have startled J. S. Mill, Mr. Brogan sets out the main thesis and purpose of every democratic polity. This re- statement is necessry because in the last two decades political liberty has been under-valued even in terms of material achievement. A school of pseudo-political poets, for example in Great Britain „during the to3o's railed against the indignity of their age and never read statistics. Even during the war there has been a tendency to assume that between tom and 5939 nothing was done to remove those in- equalities and injustices which deprived political liberty of the widest significance. Some people now believe that slum clearance in England was begun in 5940 by German bombers, and had never been the concern of the despised• politicians of the Free State.
Mr. Brogan's summary of a politician's functions would be more satisfying to Sir Robert Walpole than to the parliamentary orators of today ; yet if it is not enough to say that the politician is "a distributor of priorities, a harmoniser of claims to priorities," it remains true that a Free State in the long run is likely to be better served than any other kind of state just because it does not treat as super-men the human beings in control of the executive Lower. As for the majority whose direct exercise of political power is likely to be limited to the polling booth, the advantages of the party system in a Free State are obvious. For an unpopular minority life is not tolerable outside the Free State. As a .measure of the demoralisation caused by tyranny one has only to compare the uproar caused in France fifty years ago over an unjust sentence on a single Jew- with the complaisance of almost the whole German .people at the public torture and murder of tens of thousands of Jews.
The contemporary record of Germany sometimes compels Mr. Brogan to anger . . . "that obscene parody of Lincoln that product of the political childishness of the German people, Hitler, the demagogue without style and without truth." In general, how- ever, there is more irony than anger in Mr. Brogan's writing ; a cool "debunking" of the police state, the military state, the one-party state, and even the fatherly state; After five and a half years of war, this kind of tonic is good for British readers. In due course it might be good for German readers. It is perhaps not irreverent