duct of the same study, though of course restricted to a narrower fields that went to the making of "Mutual Aid."
The reader may wonder, particularly in view of several references in this Introduction, why Ibsen is not represented in the main contents of the compilation. But my plan has been to include only complete, or fairly complete, essays; and unfortunately, Ibsen's appearances in what he calls "my capacity as state-satirist" are in the way of brief and scattered glimpses rather than in any sustained exposition. Yet no one else, save possibly Thoreau, pierces so directly to the heart of the matter,—as witness this final quotation:
"The State is the curse of the individual. With what is the strength of Prussia as a State bought? With the merging of the individual in the political and geographical concept. The waiter makes the best soldier. Now, turn to the Jewish nation, the nobility of the human race. How has it preserved itself—isolated, poetical—despite all the barbarity from without? Because it had no State to burden it. Had the Jewish nation remained in Palestine, it would long since have been ruined in the process of construction, like all the other nations.… The State has its roots in Time: it will have its culmination in Time. Greater things than it will fall; all religion will fall. Neither the conceptions of morality nor those of art are eternal. To how much are we really obliged to pin our faith? Who will vouch for it that two and two do not make five up in Jupiter?"
