THIS delightful little book improves on a second reading. It is a mock Platonic dialogue—not pedantically close to the Greek—purporting to give Socrates' account of a lecture tour he has just taken in the United States, accompanied by Xantippe, who also lectures, with much more popular acceptance than her husband. The fun of the book runs fast, but is not furious. It is based on a subtle and penetrating but not unfriendly criticism of the prevalent mind in the United States. Much of it deals with familiar topics, Prohibition, card-indexes, the worship of numbers, facts and size, and, above all, of the new god ‘Progress.’ But it is all done more charmingly than we remember to have ever seen before, and it winds up with a companion picture of the mechanical and Philistine side of British civilisation. The remedy is to be found in the real education, on Greek lines, of young American women, who may be trusted afterwards to rule their husbands. The men are to be left for their own training to the discipline of football and baseball. The address of Socrates at the luncheon of the Rotarian Club in Hootsville is the gem of the book. He is finally shouted down when he urges that they “should do business” with the three weaving sisters of Greek mythology, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos with her dreaded shears. Did he not know, he was asked, that they in Hootsville, and everywhere else in the States, had machines which spun, measured, and cut thread in the single operation? Plato's American Republic. Done out of the Original by Douglas Woodruff. (To-day and To-morrow Series.) Pp. 122. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1926.) 2s. 6d. net.