My Second Country. By Robert Dell. (Lane. 7s. 6d. net,)-
" The more I know of the French people," says Mr. Dell in his Preface, " the fonder I become of them." Yet his book is a bitter indictment of France, her people and• her institutions, such as might have been penned by a German propagandist in Berlin. We can imagine that the French reader who is deceived by the title into expecting a friendly criticism would quote, if he knew it, the old couplet :—
" Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But—why did you kick me downstairs ? "
The fact is that Mr. Dell is an extreme Socialist, who can see nothing good in any bourgeois State. Although he admits that the French " proletariat " is " a minority in a country of property owners," he would upset the whole structure of French society for the sake of that minority. We know nothing of Mi. Dell except that, when he was Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he was expelled from France in May, 1918, for sending " reports of what took place in a confidential Committee " in regard to the Austrian peace feelers of 1917— we quote from Lord Robert Cecil's statement in reply to a question in the House of Commons. Mr. Dell at all events has his revenge in this unpleasant book.
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