London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1916. First edition, first printing. This is a very good (or better) copy. Original orange wraps with the publishers device to the front panel. Priced 1/- net to the spine. Astoundingly bright and clean, with some toning to the spine. Priced one shilling to the front panel. Internally, there is some light foxing, but this copy is otherwise clean. It is inscribed on the front fly leaf by the author in black ink: ‘Mother from Jack, May 1916’. This is a very good (or better) volume of First World War verse. The titular poem, ‘The Survival of the Fittest’, begins with an epigram from the Star. It reads: ‘Those like Mr. Strachey, of The Spectator, who say that without war the race would degenerate’. Squire speaks back in the first stanza: ‘These were my friends; | Strachey, you did not know them, | For they were simple, unaspiring men’. A sympathetic work – intimate still with familial ownership. This is his best known collection. John Collins Squire (1884-1958) was an English journalist, playwright, a leading poet of the Georgian school, and an influential critic and editor. Squire was educated at Blundell’s School and at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. He was appointed literary editor of the New Statesman in 1913, and acting editor in 1917. From 1919 to 1934 he was editor of the London Mercury, which was to become the unofficial organ of the Georgian poets.