not socialists, their place is among the large majority of working-people who are merely keeping the Socialist agitators on trial for a while, to find out what they can do besides promising the earth. They are not convinced, they are simply allured by the specious offers which the theorists make. These hard-working, hard-reading men are weighing them in the balance, and presently the bidders for their favor will be asked to deliver the goods.
That may be an ugly day of liquidation for some well-meaning reformers, a day fraught with peril of more kinds than one for us all: but, as I listened to my working-man, my confidence in the tremendous, if sluggish, common-sense of the American working-people grew strong and sanguine. If such men as he shall rule the unions, organized labor will conciliate rather than overawe capital; if the wilder element obtains control, such men as he will crush the labor organizations like an egg-shell.
And I went out on the swarming avenue, glad that I am an American.
A THIRD SHELF OF OLD BOOKS[1]
By Mrs. Fields
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Horton, Milton's Early Home
In John Milton's "Speech to the Parliament of England" upon the "Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," he says: "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature. God's image; but hee who destroys a good book, kills reason it selfe: slays an immortality rather than a life."
The "Areopagitica." with its inequalities of diction and its immortalities of thought and expression, has been made to live again for modern readers by means of the introduction written for it by Lowell a few years ago, at the instance of the Grolier Club of New York. It stands upon the shelf, a very pretty and a very precious small volume with Lowell's inscription and alterations of his own text. As an example of Lowell's English style, and of the manner in which he has, within the small compass of an introduction, served to keep the "well of English undefiled," it is of inestimable and incomparable value to the modern world of letters. His criticism of Milton's character, as expressed in his style, is a distinct contribution to the history of the man: he has strengthened the arch of Milton's fame, and brought us closer to his personality. We feel a fresh kinship to the writer who, in times not wholly unlike our own, felt the public problems to be a weight of personal responsibility.
- ↑ See Scribner's Magazine for March, 1888, and April, 1889.
