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Rh man approaching the mountains one day from Aosta and another from Zermatt. But if he should be drawn into controversies he may find that some hasty and resentful antagonist has seized upon these two statements as an illustration of his mental and moral disorders. He will be asked to stop scrapping his opinions and to make up his mind once for all whether Monte Rosa is the mountain to the left or the mountain to the right. Now at times the writer has ruffled the convictions of others and fallen into disputations, and out of the ensuing controversial give and take there has distilled an accusation that he alters his opinions frequently and completely. The other day, for instance, an amiable contemporary said of the writer that he changed his opinions as he changed his shirt. This is substantially untrue. If it were true these volumes of close upon thirty years of thinking and writing would be a poor bargain for any subscriber. But it is so far true that to the questions, "Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe in nationality?" "Do you believe in individualism, in socialism?" the writer shows himself as often disposed to answer "Yes" as "No." One cannot give precise answers to indefinable questions. In these volumes you will find the writer constantly working at the telling of just the sort of God, just the sort of England, just the sort of individual freedom and just the sort of social service he believes in, and just the sort that he repudiates and denies. Yet reading all these writings over, as this collected edition has at last obliged the writer to do, he is, he is bound to confess, surprised at his own general consistency. xix