Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/712



index to certain literary aspects of the subjects referred to this little book may have a place. It is hardly more than a catalogue of events, with very summary judgments about their meaning. For instance, under the chapter heading "Fruits of Peace," "Owen and other philanthropists," viz., Bentham, James Mill, Wordsworth, Scott, Cobbett, and Landor, are disposed of in four pages, and in that brief space we get a clue to the author's estimate of the men who write books. He seems to have no doubt that books produce liberty more than liberty produces books. If he is right, he will at least have to go back of the nineteenth century to find the books that have produced nineteenth-century liberty. Again, sixty-three pages suffice to review nineteenth-century liberty in continental Europe and in Great Britain. The remainder of the book is devoted to the United States. "The founders of American literature" claim four pages, in which there is room for Sidney Smith's overquoted fling: "Who reads an American book?" Meanwhile two pages (64, 65) are all that are necessary to represent the concrete conditions constituting liberty down to 1860. From the sociologist's viewpoint the proper description of the book would be "a sketch of the things that theorists have spoken and written about liberty, chiefly in the United States, during the past century." Of the things that actually constitute liberty, of the condition of our people with reference to them, of the precise nature of the obstacles to be overcome in extending liberty, the book reveals hardly more than it does about American geology or geography or climatology. The book is of precisely the type which the opening sentences of the preface would lead a sociologist to expect, viz.: "This book is a result of having studied the development of political and religious liberty for forty years. How well I have selected my authorities the reader can judge. I will merely say that I have mentioned no writer whom I have not studied carefully." Liberty is thus an affair of writers. If the author had secluded himself during these forty years in the Boston Athenæum, he would have had all the contact with liberty