PREFACE
During the three years now elapsed since the publication of "War and Other Essays," it has become increasingly clear to the publishers and to the editor of that collection that their original enterprise should be followed up by another volume or two. There remain a number of Professor Sumner's shorter productions which have never been printed or which have been published in obscure, scattered, or inaccessible places.
I feel this need of extending our enterprise the more strongly because I believe that a great deal of Sumner's writing has not grown old, and is not destined to grow old. It has been impressed upon me, as I have become more familiar with his essays of twenty and thirty years ago, that the issues which he treated, as he treated them, are always and everywhere with us. They are not of one time or one place. They are always with us because they are part of what Sumner so often calls "life here on earth." It was given to him to seize upon social issues in their essential and vital bearings; the blade of his insight never stuck in the husk of a matter.
Now it has seemed to me, in my own experience with Sumner, and in my teaching, that such an attitude toward the questions of societal life is, for the young at least, the one best adapted to open—wrench open, if you will—the gates of the mind and introduce the impulse to independent thinking. I do not mean at all that this result is to be attained by an unresisting acceptance of the forcefully expressed opinions of a compelling reasoner; in fact, I
