THE COAST ARTILLERY JOURNAL - Air Defense Artillery

BOOK REVIEWS 281
Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Edited by Charles A. Beard. New
York: Longmans, Green and Co. 1928. 408 p. n. $3.00.
This is a remarkable collection of fourteen articles on various aspec.t.llof modern
civilization, written by such well-knownmen as Bertrand Russell, Emil L.1idwig,Havelock
Ellis, John Dewey and Carl Van Doren. It is, in general, a justification of civilization in
the machine age and a prophecy of optimism. Difficultiesand dangers are boldly set forth,
the fact-finding method of science is employed,but the general tone of the book will please
the boosting Babbit rather than the carping critic.
Perhaps the most remarkable article is the first, on the civilizationof the East and the
West, by the Chinese savant Hu Shih. He boldly debunks the old theory that the East is
spiritual and the West materialistic, and argues that the reverse is. true. Professor Beard's
introduction and final summary are excellent.
Emil Ludwig on "War and Peace" and George A. Dorsey on "Race and Civilization"
are rather weak. Ludwig takes up most of his space in combatting the arguments of an
undefined class whom he calls "the friends of war"-tilting at wind-mills-and arrives at
nothing better than thi&--"If we give our boys tin soldiers ... teach them the glory
of a uniform ... the prestige of the State ..• the superiority of the fatherland
... they will ~eek to attain the goal which has been pointed out to them as the ideal."
Dorsey uses most of his pages in a rather spiteful and petty attack on the opposing school
of biologists, the helievers in race inheritance such as Osborn, Grant, East, Huntington and
McDougall, and in the end gives us this charming bit of inter-racialism-"The Savage is
a. rational being, morally sound, and in every respect worthy of a place in the Universal
Brotherhood of Man." For "Savages read Hottentots, Sicilians, Mexicans, Greeks, Jews,
Choctaws,and I am still in complete llccord." Whereupon the rest of us might sing that
well known old song about the Little Brown Brother.
But aside from these two articles the book is excellent, and furnishes another example
of the selective discrimination of the Book-of-the-MonthClub.-S. M.
The Story of the Gypsies. By Konrad Bercovici. New York: CosmopolitanBook Corporation.
1928. 294 p. $4.00.
This book is really a collection of notes on the strange people, the Gypsies. Bercovici
himself is a Roumanian. His childhood seems to have been passed in close contact with
Gypsies, and he has wondered allover the World studying them.
He thinks they were originally Jats, of the Sudra. (the lowest) caste in India. These
people were enslavedhy the early Hindu conquerors, and gradually filtered out into western
Asia and Europe. This infiltration hegan, probably, at a very early date and has continued
up until fairly recent times. The great European center of the Gypsies seems to have been
Macedonia, perhaps through the Asiatic conquests of Alexander. From this center as a
breeding ground they have spread west throughout Europe and America (the United States
and Brazil).
Bercovici sees ill them an entirely different conception of civilization from that of the
rest of the World. The Gypsies have no words for "possession" or "duty." Their controlling
passion is for freedom in its broadest sense, unabridged by possessionsor by duties
to any state or community. Their marriage vows, for instance, specifically bind a couple
only so long as love lasts. As Bercovici puts it, their "Ancestors were of the last of those
who lost their wings. The gypsy is stilI practically in the bird stage."
The driving power behind this intense centrifugal spirit seems to he a very strong
superiority complex. The gypsy not only rejects our conception of a settled civilization,
based on possessions and duties, but believes himself to be superior to it and to us. This,
coupled with bis extraordinary cult of the dead (his dead), has enabled him to survive in