THE NEW POCKET LIBRARY Printed from a clear type, upon a specially thin and Size, Pott 8vo. (6 x 3 inches). JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., LONDON, W. FEBRUARY, 1907 CONTENTS CURRENT EVENTS: FRANCE, RUSSIA, THE LONDON PAGE I 22 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORALS: MORALS IN EVOLUTION, BY L. T. HOBHOUSE JOHN LANE, The Bodley Head, Vigo Street, London, W. America: JOHN LANE COMPANY, 67 Fifth Avenue, New York. Toronto: THE TORONTO NEWS COMPANY. Montreal: THE MONTREAL NEWS COMPANY. No. 41.-VOL. XII. 121 K [NOTE. All Articles in the INdependent REVIEW are Copyright in the States covered by the Berne Convention.] THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW The Coming CURRENT EVENTS NE thing at least is certain about the Education difficulty. Social reformers are not going to allow the energies of another session to be spent upon a question which, to them, is of secondary importance. The Government has done the best that it can do under present conditions to fulfil its pledge about religious teaching. It must necessarily turn its attention now to the fundamental problems of poverty and privilege. Fairer taxation and land reform-the indispensable basis of any social reconstruction-stand first in importance. For an instalment of the former we may look forward to the Budget with a confidence tempered only by what seem at present the somewhat extravagant demands of Mr. Haldane. The claims of the latter will need determined advocacy if it is not to be relegated to an unduly subordinate position. It is difficult to see on what ground the liquor question deserves that precedence which it is expected in some quarters to receive. Education and the Lords The only way to deal at present with the Education difficulty is to take in hand such improvements as can be carried out with a small expenditure of Parliamentary time. Provision can be made for play centres and compulsory medical inspection, inserted in Mr. Birrell's bill and not contested. Unsectarian training colleges can be created. The existing law as to school efficiency can be enforced to the full. New schools can be built by the aid of Exchequer grants. Any primarily financial reform can be embodied in a Money Bill, which the Lords will be unable to alter. It was probably this point which the Prime Minister had partly in mind in his emphatic declaration that "the resources of the constitution are not exhausted." It would be possible, for example, to prohibit all payment from public funds for religious teaching in schools not publicly controlled; or to withdraw all rate aid from denominational schools in singleschool areas. The House of Commons is entitled, not only to make grants for carrying on the government of the country, but to attach to them any qualifications it chooses. But no final treatment of the elementary school problem will be, or ought to be, attempted before the inevitable struggle between Commons and Lords has been brought to a head. The appeal to the people must indeed be postponed until the Government has brought forward, in finance and in land reform, an instalment of its policy of social reconstruction, large enough and definite enough to point quite clearly the line of advance, to strike the imagination, and to unite the forces of progress. Longer than that it ought not to be delayed. A tame acceptance of failure after failure has been proved by the experience of 1895 to be a ruinous policy. Parties are judged by their achievement, not their motives. Either a dissolution, or preferably a plébiscite of some kind without a dissolution, must come before two years are over. The Small Holdings Committee's Report is discussed below from different points of view by Mr. E. O. Fordham and Mr. R. Munro Ferguson, M.P., both intimately acquainted with the subject. The Small one large advance which it makes is the proposal that a special branch of the Board of Agriculture should be created, to make definite experiments in the creation of Small Holdings; and that Compulsory powers should be conferred on the Board for the purchase of land, which may be either let or sold in Small Holdings. There is a vast mass of evidence available, by the way, including the thick volume presented by the Committee itself, to show |