156 SHORT NOTICES January 1 for death involves a total cessation of personality To deduce, as Mr. Cole continually does, practical proposals from some elaborate defi- nition is quite unconvincing. On the other hand, many philosophers have fallen into the same error, and this error represents a general tendency to seek philosophic justification for proposals adopted on quite other grounds. Unfortunately the method obscures not only the real grounds behind the concrete proposals, but also the character of the proposals themselves. One may, however, attempt to indicate briefly Mr. Cole's central doctrine. He believes that orthodox political theory does too little justice to organizations other than the state. He is dissatisfied with ordinary parliamentary government, and he dislikes its position of authority over trade unions and other organizations. Above all he is displeased by economic inequality, which he believes to be the source of most social evils. He therefore proposes that trade unions and other ' essential ' organizations should have legislative authority equal to that of parliament. The authority of parliament or the state should be con- fined to ' political ' activities only, and political activities he reduces (by one of his least convincing definitions) to the social regulation of certain personal relationships, the most notable of which is marriage. The sovereign state is thus abolished, but Mr. Cole is compelled to reintroduce it. It reappears in the form of a co-ordinating authority composed apparently of representatives chosen from the different essential associa- tions, including, it may be presumed, parliament or the state. He speaks of this as a ' constitutional judiciary ' rather than a ' legislature It is however perfectly clear that, as it is to control foreign policy and the army and navy, this description of it is quite inadequate. Both here and in regard to the subordinate associations he has not really thought the matter out. H. J. P. In his Nationality and its Problems (London : Methuen, 1920) Mr. Sydney Herbert gives a general introduction to a difficult subject. At the beginning of the late war, while our opponents were credited with the view that the time of small nations is past, we maintained that the cause of the small nations was also our own. Many of our writers went on to argue that no political division of the world could be regarded as satisfactory unless it rested on a basis of nationality. Each nationality should be allowed to manage its own affairs, and no nationality should be so predominant as to interfere with the development of any other. Every political sugges- tion has its intellectual difficulties : but it soon became plain that this conception has more than its fair share of difficulties. In the first place, nation and nationality are hard terms to define : Mr. Herbert's discussion of this part of his subject shows that we have not advanced far beyond tentative suggestions. Then again, any attempt to rearrange the map of Europe on national lines proves to be hopeless unless it is accompanied by enforced removal of inconvenient minorities. Mr. Herbert has little difficulty in showing that the principle of nationality, where it is at all strongly developed, bears hardly on the representatives of other nationalities within the same political area ; Hungary and Germany are easy illustrations, but Mr. Herbert hints that Welshmen and
