u will
catch in it a real air of youth, a spring-time wind blowing from the
half-forgotten world in which all of us once were chartered privateers.
There are, of course, worthy folk who would be simply bored by all
this--which is why I do not venture to call _Pirates of the Spring_
everyone's reading; others, however, more fortunate, will find it a true
and delicately observed study of an engaging theme.

* * * * *

I must really warn the flippant. It would be appalling if admirers of
_Literary_ (and other) _Lapses_ were to send blithely to the libraries for
Mr. LEACOCK'S latest and find themselves landed with _The Unsolved Riddle
of Social Justice_ (LANE). And yet I don't know. Here is a subject which
even the flippant cannot long ignore. And a man of the world with a clear
head and a mastery of clearer idiom than a professor of political economy
usually commands has here said something desperately serious without a
trace of dulness. I should like Professor LEACOCK'S short book to be
divided into three. The first part, a trenchant analysis of some of the
evils of our social and industrial system, I would send to the
impossibilists and obstructives; the second, a critical examination of some
of the nostrums of the progressives, should go to the hasty optimists who
think that a sudden change of system will as suddenly change men, for it
contains much that they will do well (and now resolutely refuse) to ponder.
The third part I would return to the author for revision, for it contains
no more, when analysed, than an _ipse dixit_, and quite fails to show that
the evils denounced as intolerable in the first part can be remedied
without some substantial portion at least of the heroic reforms denounced
in his second. Also I would remind him, or rather perhaps the more
ingenuous of his readers, that there have been later contributions to the
theory and practice of new-world building than Mr. BELLAMY'S _Looking
Backward_.

* * * * *

_The Great Desire_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is a novel full of shrewd
philosophy and excellent talk. Mr. ALEXANDER BLACK sets out to prove
nothing, to justify no political or social attitude, but just to draw his
fellow-Americans as he sees them going about their war-time business, the
"great desire" being simply the thing that is uppermost in the mind of each
one. As a composite picture of what New York thought about the business of
g