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THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
744483 A

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

R

1934

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MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY.

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"Marvels of clear type and general neatress."-Daily Telegraph.

INTRODUCTION.

THE man who has something to say, and says it in as many words as are necessary to the clear, full and emphatic expression of his thought, must often be unable, without help of tedious impertinences, to spread it in ink over one or two pounds' weight of paper. The weightiest intellectual contribution to the study of some living question may possibly require for its true utterance not more than a dozen or two of printed leaves. Waste words are for some idle brain. Our modern Reviews and Magazines are, in one sense, a device for the collection of short pamphlets worth diffusion into volumes that have such currency as to assure their being widely read, and kept on record. Before there were Reviews established for such periodical collection each pamphlet came alone into the world, and in the days of the first famous pamphlet in this volume, Milton's Areopagitica, burning questions of the day that would now be argued out in leading articles and in reviews, were discussed by pamphlets in which every man fought for himself his battle of opinion, to be answered in pamphlets of opponents, and to be replied to in new pamphlets, until each question of truth and error had lain long enough in the sieve to be thoroughly sifted by the to and fro of opposite opinions. Sometimes, as in the old Church controversy between Whitgift and Cartwright, strong feeling and the wide stretch of the question caused these pamphlets of attack, reply, rejoinder to the reply, &c., to extend to the form of massive folios, heavy enough to knock down an antagonist if thrown as solid paper at his head. But though there was quick fencing with these folios, and they were produced as promptly as if they had been pamphlets in bulk as they were pamphlets in essence, they were technically volumes.

Why a work produced only upon a few leaves was called a pamphlet, it is hard to say with any certainty. Some say it was so called from the French paume and feuillet, as a leaf held in the hand. Others say that it was from a woman named Pamphila, who lived about eighteen hundred years ago and wrote many epitomes; others go for the source of the word to Spanish.

The most famous pamphlet in our language, and, considering its

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whole aim and the grandeur of some passages, the noblest piece of English prose, is that which stands first in this collection, John Milton's "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England." Henry VIII., when he destroyed the Pope's authority in England, took it to himself. He continued the censorship of books, which had been established for the suppression of opinions hostile to the established faith, and extended censorship over political writings which had not been checked by Rome. Queen Elizabeth allowed printing only to a few known presses in London, Oxford and Cambridge, and that was not the liberty of printing, for there was strict endeavour to suppress utterance of opinion that might disturb the order of the State. A decree of the Star Chamber, in 1637, limited the number of printers in the whole country to twenty and of type-founders to four, with provision for strict censorship of all they uttered to the world. In 1640 the Star Chamber was abolished, but in 1643, on the 14th of June, the Parliament adopted the same policy of suppression, by an Ordinance for the regulating of printing. Milton at once set himself to reason with the chiefs of his own party, and used all the force of his genius to make them understand that truth can be established only by the freest interchange of thought. The principle for which he contended is that upon which all healthy growth and national prosperity, in its true sense, must depend. He took for his model an oration written to be read, which was addressed by Isocrates to the Areopagus, the Great Council of Athens, and is known as the Areopagitic Discourse. Isocrates called on the Parliament of Athens to undo acts of its own; Milton was making a like call on the Areopagus of England. He gave to his work the exact form of a Greek oration, with exordium, statement, proof and peroration; and he put into it the very soul of England, claiming freedom in the search for truth. It was published in November 1644.

The next pamphlet in this collection, "Killing No Murder," was published in 1657, and is, perhaps, in our political literature, the most famous example of free utterance of free opinion, for it was a direct incitement to the assassination of Oliver Cromwell. It professed upon its title-page to be by William Allen, but its real author seems to have been the Colonel Sexby, a leveller, who had gone over to the Royalists, and in 1656, having come from Flanders to shoot Cromwell, joined the Protector's escort in Hyde Park and almost secured his opportunity. But he went back to Flanders, leaving sixteen hundred pounds of the money entrusted to him for such purposes with a cashiered quartermaster, Miles Sindercombe, who was to do the deed. Sindercombe took a house at Hammersmith in the narrow part of a road through which Cromwell often passed, and began by the shaping of a battery of

seven blunderbusses. But difficulties came in his way. He resolved then to set fire to Whitehall and in the confusion to kill the Protector as he came out. A hundred swift horses were ready for changes to secure his escape. Many were aiding and abetting, and all was done with knowledge of the prince who ruled afterwards as Charles the Second. But the secret was shared by one too many. Henry Toope, a Lifeguardsman, disclosed it. Sindercombe was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, but took poison on the day before that which had been appointed for his execution. Then Sexby wrote and printed his pamphlet ; himself travelling about England disguised as a countryman, with a large beard, to secure its distribution. He was after a time arrested and sent to the Tower, where he became mad and died within a year. After the Restoration, Colonel Titus claimed the honour of having written this pamphlet, and it was afterwards reprinted as his, with the doctrine of assassination freshly applied on the titlepage to the French king.

Daniel De Foe's pamphlet, called the "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," which comes next in this collection, was first published in 1702, at the beginning of Queen Anne's reign. The party that had no sympathy with the spirit of the English Revolution of 1688-89 then had a chance of power. There was a vigorous attack upon dissent, and a Bill had passed the House of Commons (but had been thrown out by the Lords) for disqualifying Dissenters from all civil employments. De Foe, bred a Dissenter, but as little in sympathy with the intolerance of one party as of the other, wrote with a fine irony in the character of a thorough-going Churchman, and argued the theory of persecution to its logical end in the impossible and the absurd. The reader will observe a curious resemblance between the style of argument in "Killing No Murder "-incitement to the assassination of a man-which was meant to be taken seriously, and that in "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters"-incitement to the assassination of a party-which was meant be taken as satire. De Foe's treatment of intolerance brought him to prison and the pillory. For the writing of this pamphlet, he stood in the pillory on the three last days of July 1703, but by a Hymn to the Pillory dispersed among the people, he turned what was meant for his disgrace into a triumph, and transferred the contempt of the people to the men who placed him there.

For the next pamphlet in this volume, "The Crisis," a defender of English liberties not less in earnest than De Foe, the true-hearted Richard Steele, was expelled from the House of Commons at the end of Queen Anne's reign, on the 18th of March, 1714, by the same party that at the beginning of the reign had pilloried De Foe. There had been underhand dealings in aid of a second restoration of the Stuarts, and

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