THE BURNING BOOK

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt
Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of
Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while
his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers
who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in
words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward.
How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued
slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it!
"Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until
the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic
writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If
men would only listen to reason--if they would listen even to the
appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow
quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at
a distance, and the prophet is near.

Nevertheless, in his address as Chancellor of Manchester University in
June 1912, Lord Morley, who has himself often sounded the prophetic
note, asserted that "a score of books in political literature rank as
acts, not books." He happened to be speaking on the anniversary of
Rousseau's birth, two hundred years ago, and in no list of such books
could Rousseau's name be forgotten. "Whether a score or a hundred," Lord
Morley went on, "the _Social Contract_ was one," and, as though to rouse
his audience with a spark, he quoted once more the celebrated opening
sentence, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." That
sentence is not true either in history or in present life. It would be
truer to say that man has everywhere been born in chains and, very