National Reconstruction

“RECONSTRUCTION,” like Mesopotamia, is a blessed word, and already there exists a considerable literature to expound its illimitable possibilities. The value of that literature is not equal to its bulk, for the writers too often have been misled by some passing phase of a rapidly shifting situation, or are the victims of doctrinaire theories or, worse, of “the Phrase,” which Mr. Robinson notes “is very real and oppressive just now—the artificial and captivating jingles which are often made to do duty for facts and for reasoning from facts.” If we had not enough already of “the monstrous regiments of people paid to get other people to do things,” there would be justification for a censor who would refuse to pass for publication books on “reconstruction,” unless they were written by those who combined some training in disciplined thinking with adequate experience of administrative problems—the perennial difficulty, in short, of achieving demonstrable progress by the machinery of institutions, working on, and worked by, men and women as they really are. The defects of the average administrator and the limitations of machinery are too commonly forgotten by those who assume in three hundred and fifty pages that a new British Empire can be created by a crop of committees and an encyclopædia of legislation in a few years “after the war.”

National Reconstruction: A Study in Practical Politics and Statesmanship.

By J. J. Robinson. Pp. x + 155. (London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd., 1918.) Price 2s. 6d. net.