Some Publications. (1907)

Book Reviews from the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

More Books to Read on Social and Economic subjects. The Fabian Society. One Penny.

A list of books which the Editors think are likely to be required by Socialists and Social Reformers. The Editors do not pretend to have examined all the books catalogued, nor are they prepared to assert that the works are correctly classified, nor can they hope that there are no omissions, nor that every book named is rightly included. In these circumstances the pamphlet may conceivably be useful to the student who finds in it the information he wants !

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The Reformers' Yearbook. Paper, 1s., Cloth, 2s., net.

For 1907 this well-known annual contains those useful compilations of facts and figures which we have come to expect in it and which we, as exponents of the revolutionary method are able to use so effectively against the reform advocate for whose purposes, as the title signifies, the book was specially designed. Nevertheless its Editors have so far as in them lied, endeavoured to confine its scope to the records of reform agitations and reform parties and the views of those who are steeped to the eyes in unadulterated revisionism—if such a term is permissible as descriptive of methods essentially the result of the adulteration of the revolutionary idea. Therefore it is fitting that while such reform organisations as the S.D.F., the League of Young Liberals, the Young Scots’ Society, the Patent Law Reform Association and the Women’s Social and Political Union and the rest of the bodies which go to make up the weirdest packet of political ineptitude that was ever flung at the heads of a long suffering democracy, find adequate inclusion, and while the words of the sundry and divers mouthpieces of these bodies stand boldly up upon many a page there is no reference to the revolutionary S.P.G.B. or its work. However, as we say, the book contains much that is interesting and useful to the discriminative propagandist of Socialism and if it also contains much that is of no consequence such as the articles on the Decay of Liberalism, the propertied woman’s suffrage agitation, “Some Urgent Reforms,” “A Commune for London,” and so on, we cannot help it.