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MILL'S POLITICAL ECONOMY 315 chapter on the Non-Interference Principle asserts that education is one of the areas in which government is justified in taking action-because the consumer is an incompetent judge of the commodity. Under the voluntary principle, English education had failed to progress from chaos: "it is never good except by some rare accident, and generally so bad as to be little more than nominal." Mill's ultimate concern is with the quality of the lives led in a society. Superior education is the key to raising that quality. Not only would properly educated youth understand that true self-interest depends upon the advancement of the public interest but also they would be thoroughly impressed with the importance of the population problem. Mill was a whole-hearted Malthusian and believed there could be no permanent improvement of society unless population be under "the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight." Indeed, if his society had been as advanced in contraception as ours is, Mill unquestionably would have called for a public policy that had as its goal the levelling off of economic growth. One of the many high points of the Political Economy is the chapter on the Stationary State, in which Mill rejects the assumptions of other political economists, McCulloch for instance, about the desirability of indefinitely pursuing higher rates of economic development. Mill is "not charmed with the ideal of life held out hy those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels are the most desirable lot of human kind." The ideal economic state of society for Mill is that in which uno one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward." ( PAUL MARX) SEEING HEINE PLAIN" Heine is easy to read and hard to write about. As a result, the great corpus of uHeine literature" abounds in books written around him rather than about him, some of them by critics perversely intent on discovering mysteries where none exist. Our tendency to make an enigma of Heine is sometimes caused by a fragmentary knowledge of his work. Thus Humbert Wolfe, an excellent translator of Heine's songs, but only of his songs, invites us in the preface to II'Barker Fairley, Heinrich Heine. An Interpretation. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1954. Pp. 176. ISs. (German version: Heinrich Heine. Ene Interpretation . Stuttgart: Mettler. 1965.) Laura Hofrichter, Heinrich Heine. Translated by Barker Fairley. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1963. Pp. 174 38s. (German version: Heinrich Heine.. Biographie. sein.er Dichtung. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1966.) Heinrich Heine. Selected. Poems. Edited by Barker Fairley. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1965. Pp. xii, 247. 30s. Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum and Deutschland. Ein Wintermarchen. Edited by Barker Fairley. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1966. Pp. 243. 13s. 6d. 316 C. P. MAGILL Selected Lyrics of Heinrich Heine to consider the puzzle of Heine's enduring appeal. After all, he was a poet "who had but two strings, and but one tune," he was "extravagantly and often nauseatingly romantic," he was /fa shocking sentimentaHst." 'What," we are asked, "is the secret of this Gennan Jew who became a French Christian, this revolutionary who lived on government funds, this most weakling of lovers who dies with a gallant jest on his lips?" Little wonder that, having asked the wrong questions, Humbert Wolfe offers unilluminating answers. Sometimes our ability to see Heine plain is affected by intellectual fashions and personal fads. In the English-speaking world, his reputation as a major poet was established by 1870, but largely through the advocacy of George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, whose view of him was brightly coloured by their own values. Since then we have had exhibited to us Heine the Hellene, Heine the cultural pessimist, Heine the mouthpiece of ('the modem world" of transition and spiritual fennent, Heine the democrat and citizen of the world, a bone of contention between eastern and western ideologues. It was thus possible for Sol Liptzin, in The English Legend of...

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