century declared that the
world was ruled by books. What, think you, has most profoundly altered the
condition of the world in the last hundred years? Kings, statesmen,
conquerors? Not so; an armful of books, about as many as a schoolboy
carries in his satchel. The result of these books was not always
beneficent, but it was always immense. The war of arms and of diplomacy
which England carried on against the French Republic and the French Empire
for a dozen years, and which left us the National Debt as a memorial, took
its first impulse from a little book written by Edmund Burke. The
Revolution which it combatted was as certainly the fruit of other books.
The declaration of Irish independence pronounced by the Convention at
Dunganon, and confirmed by the parliament in College Green, simply
formulated the doctrine of a little volume by Molyneux which the House of
Commons at Westminster had caused to be burned by the common hangman. All
that has been done in later days for Free Trade and unrestricted
competition, for the self-government of Colonies, and the education of the
people, was first taught in the treatise of an Edinburgh professor; a book
which has influenced the current of thought and legislation in the British
Empire, and far beyond it, more than any other book written since the
invention of printing.[1] The desire to unfetter the negro which
culminated in the decrees of Abraham Lincoln and the victories of Ulysses
Grant began in a work of genius written by a woman and read by the whole
civilized world. The successive despots expelled during the last sixty
years by the French people, from Charles the Tenth to Napoleon the Third,
were driven out less at the point of the bayonet than at the point of the
pen. The social changes wrought by books in the same era we would,
perhaps, relinquish less willingly than any of these political gains. The
humanising of English law long steeped in blood and tears, is less
attributable to bench and bar than to the books of Jeremy Bentham. If the
Court of Chancery is no longer the patron and factor of dilapidated
edifices and ruined fortunes, if the Dotheboys halls of Yorkshire are shut
up, is it not chiefly to a couple of novels by Charles Dickens we owe
these salutary changes? One little volume written by a woman, critics
assure us, routed filth and laziness out of the farmhouses of Scotland. It
was the novelist Charles Reade who made Englishmen ashamed of the
murderous silent s