“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 slowly, in some few parts of the world, he is becoming free.  The sentence is neither scientific as historic theory nor true to present life, and yet Lord Morley rightly called it electrifying.  And the same is true of the book which it so gloriously opens.  As history and as philosophy, it is neither original nor exact.  It derived directly from Locke, and many aspects of the world and thought since Darwin’s time confute it.  But, however much anticipated, and however much exposed to scientific ridicule, it remains one of the burning books of the world—­one of those books which, as Lord Morley said, rank as acts, not books.

“Let us realise,” he continued, “with what effulgence such a book burst upon communities oppressed by wrong, sunk in care, inflamed by passions of religion or of liberty, the two eternal fields of mortal struggle.”  So potent an influence depends much upon the opportunity of time—­the fulfilment of the hour’s need.  A book so abstract, so assertive of theory, and standing so far apart from the world’s actual course, would hardly find an audience now.  But in the eighteenth century, so gaily confident in the power of reason, so trustful of good intentions, so ready to acclaim