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This is a really excellent production. It must be a far from easy thing to address an uninformed and diverse audience on these themes at such length. And there are few unnecessary words, for Dr. Glover has managed to express in the compass allotted to him an enormous number of helpful ideas and a fill of practical advice. These are all expounded with his accustomed fluency and there can be no doubt about his getting them home. He is at equal ease in the colloquialisms of the bar room as in expressing the more dignified reflections to which he constantly recalls the reader, but he evidently shares the chariness of the British, on which he pointedly comments, to voice aloud passionate attachments to any ideal.
Dr. Glover pins his faith to re-assurance. While urging that both fears and hatreds be frankly admitted and recognized, he would deal with those of unconscious origin rather by discounting them as mere relics of the distant past (even of an ancestral past) than by encouraging any investigation of their real nature. Opinions among psycho-analysts may differ on this matter, but it must not be forgotten that in such a case writer and reader are not in personal contact with each other and that the former has to weigh the possible good with the probable harm were he to contemplate the blind prodding of the latter's unconscious.
The real theme of the book is morale, and on it Dr. Glover has many pertinent and illuminating things to say. He begins by maintaining that the sustenance or destruction of morale is every nation's secret weapon and not only Germany's as blazoned to the world by Hitler in Mein Kampf. He then goes on to say:
The real difficulty about British morale is not that it is bad. The morale of free men is the finest in the world. But in times of war it suffers from one serious disadvantage. People who enjoy peace and comparative freedom under democracy are more inclined to divide up their energies and allegiances.
The British morale is therefore