NO ILLUSIONS PLEASE!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 38, 15 March 1940, Page 43

NO ILLUSIONS PLEASE!

UCKED away between the hills for a long week-end, one can, just occasionally, chance on a jewel of a book. John Langdon-Davies, however, is not so much a jewel as an invaluable metal. I had already devoured his " History of Woman," and here, in a farm-house kitchen, in a heap of seed catalogues, simple patterns and _ brochures of agricultural implements, I came on his "A Short History of the Future." What a book-what a mind! The rain pattered, but who cared! Here was sanity. A novelist’s fluency, a scientist’s sureness of touch, an idealist’s broad vision, A country library exchange, Somewhere about the third page I was brought up with a round turn, "On my first day at an English Public School I sat down to School Chapel with some 400 boys. . . "Suppose that, in that morning, at 9.10a.m. of September 20, 1910, the Headmaster of Headmasters had appeared above the altar and read from a scroll in His hands the names of 100 of us boys-the name of the boy to my right, 5 of the boys on the bench behind, and so forth, and had said, ‘These hundred boys, one in four of those present, will never have children, will never marry, will never enter their fathers’ businesses. In seven years their bodies, more or less intact, will be lying in foreign graves.’ "He would have spoken the truth, of course. But what difference would it have made?

"Tf our parents had known could they have saved those hundred boys? Or, not being able to save them, could they not have given them a carefree boyhood, since they were to be denied all manhood by the stupidity of their elders? * And we who are left, and have boys in our turn, are we powerless to prevent those same forces working to the same result? "... We have been warned, and we dread them night and day. We cannot wash our hands of the future. But what can we do?" That is not the end of the book-as it might be, indeed, with so many that are written to-day-but the beginning. The rest of it-every one of its concise illuminating pages — is given over to telling us what we can, and must, do. The thing that appears to have got, so disastrously, beyond our control is, the author suggests, within it. John Langdon-Davies is essentially the scientist. He strips us of all illusions, But-he leaves us hope. What Are Children Worth? Recently, when Europe still resembled Europe, a young man and his wife concluded a curious contract. Borrowing the not extraordinary sum of £16/16/on which to marry and set up housekeeping together, they promised in repayment to provide Hungary with four healthy children. Value; four guineas apiece. What price do you put on yours?

A.

G.