the
intellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to say,
I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that was
not already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial
philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the
Chinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its original
form, as published in 1918, the book was actuary just such a pastiche of
proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen,
newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy
to hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert
notions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia.
But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get
through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There is
no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and
unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and most
of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies,
a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered truths about the
woman question, a headlong assault upon the national decencies. In the
South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to extraordinary lengths, even
for the United States, some of the newspapers actually denounced the
book as German propaganda, designed to break down American morale, and
called upon the Department of Justice to proceed against me for the
crime known to American law as "criminal anarchy," i.e., "imagining the
King's death." Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and
lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they received
many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these
complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries
would give me entertainment in those dull days of war, with all
intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of the
book. But the Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to
the righteous indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially
the suffragists. Their concern, after all, is not with books that are
denounced; what they concentrate their moral passion on is the book that
is praised.

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more
civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number
of propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be
omitted fro