"DICTATORSHIPS and Democracies" is a collection of brief essays which emphasize obvious facts that many people need to have repeated to them.

Professor Hoover, the author, points out that Soviet Russia is not communistic and that Nazi Germany is not capitalistic. He shows that wage differentials and interest on government bonds earmark the Soviet economy. The essentially anti-captitalists nature of Fascism is illustrated by complete government control of the investment of profits, payments of dividends, and poce of production.

After charting the dismalcours of the totalitarian states, the author turns to the struggling democracies. Professor Hoover realizes that changing conditions require a reconsideration of the government. He notes that we are in the twentieth century and suggests that the political theories which accorded with the facts of the previous hundred years may have to be modified to permit gov- ornmont to assume its new responsibilities--to break the severity of depressions in a world that has seen semi-monopoly and corporate organization throttle free competition and the entrpreneur, Unlike Walter Lippmann, Hoover does not advocate that we solve all our problems by waving the common law in the face of the United States Steel Corporation.

The author feels that the future of parliamentary democracies rests with the success of their efforts to "salvage a limited degree of laissez-faire and to combine it with the management by the state of some elements of the economy." England has been aided in this effort by "the existence of a generation of industrialists who long ago accepted the principle of collective bargaining. . . by the existence of labor leaders who have accepted the principle of national responsibility."

Professor Hoover himself does not indicate the means by which this understanding between the government, industrialists and labor leaders can be brought about. But others have suggested that we stop bandying glib phrases and slogans like "rugged individualism" and "that government is best which governs least"; that we can no longer afford to allow symbols like the "totalitarian state" and "Fascist regimentation" to obscure the practical imperative need for the activity of the one agency that can cushion the ruthless forces of a dynamic world