It is not unemployment alone, but the unemployment carrying with it a stoppage of pay that chiefly concerns us here. When a living is guaranteed by dividends, pension, or a sufficiently large dole, we can, for the most part, bear without discomfort the inconvenience of “no work.”

To-day there are in Great Britain at least a million capable people, men and women of various trades and occupations, of varying degrees in skill, training, and muscular strength, who are out of work, and out of wages. They are unemployed, existing precariously on meagre trade union allowance, on unemployment “benefits,” or on casual relief. They stand by in idleness in the market-place of every town because no one will hire them.

At the present time there are also many millions of people in Europe, men, women, and children, needing food, clothing, and dwelling places. (In especial the pitiful needs of the children of middle Europe are constantly brought to our notice.) In England alone many thousands are in need of these necessary things, while many thousands more, hard put to secure the bare necessities of physical life, worn out with anxiety in the struggle for a living, fade and perish in their prime.

These two facts, then, may be noted.

(1) A large population in need of food, clothing, and dwelling-places, and unable to obtain these things.

(2) A large population capable of producing food, clothing, and dwelling places unable to engage in such production because no one will employ them.

It has long been recognized that there is a psychology not only of individuals, but also of groups. As with the hypothetical units of physics— electrons and atoms—so with the real units of the animal kingdom and of the human race, the group has a definite constitution and definite laws expressing its behaviour which are not the same as those which express the behaviour of the individuals of which the group is composed. Man is not merely an intelligent animal : he is also essentially a social animal, and, if the human race is to make progress, it is of supreme importance that the factors in social life which make for progress or for deterioration should be analysed out and critically discussed in their concrete historical setting.

This is the main aim of Professor McDougall’s latest work, The Group Mind., a book no less interesting than the other psychological works which Prof. McDougall has given us, and no less provocative of thought. It purports, in fact, to be the continuation of his Social Psychology, and assumes that the factors and principles of social life, as there laid down, are already familiar to the reader. These it now discusses from the point of view of the group. In the First Part the characteristics of different kinds of groups are set forth, notably those of the crude group or crowd and those of the most highly organized group—the army. Then there is a discussion of the group spirit, of the interrelation and interaction of groups, and of the peculiarities of certain types of group.

In his recently published lecture, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Mr. de la Mare tells an amusing story by way of showing how in 1916 his reputation as a poet stood “in the great eye of America.” He went one day to pay his respects to a friend of Rupert Brooke’s in New York. “A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she exclaimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, ‘Gee whiz ! What a name !’”

It is to be hoped that the poet’s diffidence made him underestimate his fame in the United States ; even Mr. Kipling could not expect to be as well known by name to a lift-attendant as the latest cinema hero : “One star differeth from another in glory,” or at least in conspicuousness. Yet it is scarcely to be disputed that something remains to be done before the readers of Mr. de la Mare’s poetry, on both sides of the Atlantic, are as numerous as they should be. The poet of Motley and The Listeners will certainly never be as popular as Miss Mary Pickford ; he would disclaim any such ambition. He will probably never be as well known even as Mr. Kipling, or the friend whom he praises so generously in the essay from which we have quoted. Nevertheless, his work ought to be, and, we hope, when his Collected Poems have made their due impression, will be much more widely read and discussed than it is at present.

A Great controversy must always leave its aftermath. Hence it is to be feared that recent discussions in and out of Parliament and Convocation will be found to have left in the minds of many the impression that somehow or other there is room for doubt as to what Christ really did teach on the subject of divorce. Indeed this is hardly to be wondered at when even the Archbishop of York declared that while “he personally was of opinion that marriage was dissoluble only by death” he yet acknowledged that others thought that adultery was a legitimate reason for divorce. And who can help feeling like Alice in Wonderland when he hears Lord Phillimore saying that “the Christian Church had taught that marriage was almost indissoluble until death”? The “almost” is piquant and delightful ! One would “almost” prefer the cynical frankness of the Lord Chancellor, who does not mince his words but says out plainly that “the arguments of those who oppose divorce are the whisperings of the abandoned superstitions of the Middle Ages.” One is even tempted to a sneaking admiration of the Archbishop of Canterbury who—when challenged by the same Lord Chancellor to say whether the innocent party in a divorce committed adultery by re-marrying—answered with an emphatic “No !” At least we have here definite and consistent views.

Still from all this a man logically concludes that there must be some reason why some hold that the innocent party should be free to re-marry and that adultery should be regarded by some as a legitimate ground for divorce.