Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/24

 "The Song of the Shirt," and "The Cry of the Children," and "A Man's a Man for A' That"; neither could it omit the "Marseillaise" and the "Internationale." Equally inevitable were selections from Shelley and Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle and Morris, Whitman, Tolstoy and Zola. The same was true of Wells and Shaw and Kropotkin, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland and Anatole France. When it came to the newer writers, I sought first their own judgment as to their best work; and later I submitted the manuscript to several friends, the best qualified men and women I knew. Thus the final version was the product of a number of minds; and the collection may be said to represent, not its editor, but a whole movement, made and sustained by the master-spirits of all ages.

For this reason I may without suspicion of egotism say what I think about the volume. It was significant to me that several persons reading the manuscript and writing quite independently, referred to it as "a new Bible." I believe that it is, quite literally and simply, what the old Bible was—a selection by the living minds of a living time of the best and truest writings known to them. It is a Bible of the future, a Gospel of the new hope of the race. It is a book for the apostles of a new dispensation to carry about with them; a book to cheer the discouraged and console the wounded in humanity's last war of liberation.

The standards of the book are those of literature. If there has been any letting down, it has been in the case of old writings, which have an interest apart from that of style. It brings us a thrill of wonder to find, in an ancient Egyptian parchment, a father setting forth to his son how easy is the life of the lawyer, and what a