This book may well prove as important a contribution to post-war-world planning as Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace might have had, if it had come before instead of after Versailles. It is not easy reading; it is not easy taking; there are many who will call it revolutionary -- he denies any possibility of turning back the leaves; there are others who will feel his realistic acceptance of the necessity of finding a place for Germany in a post-war Europe too humane. But the very publication of such a book (and its reception in England) is a salutary acceptance of the challenge to work now towards ""conditions of peace"". This is no inelastic and fixed schedule; rather is it a framework, an austere one, for an interim period, policed militarily and economically by England, Russia, the U. S. A., before any terms of peace or fixing of boundaries be attempted, for a planning authority, for reconstruction out of chaos. The London Times rightly calls this an ""act of leadership.