e the immortality of
the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing
in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile
minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty,
isn't that high enough mission for a man? The bookseller is the real
Mr. Valiant-For-Truth.

"Here's my War-alcove," he went on. "I've stacked up here most of the
really good books the War has brought out. If humanity has sense
enough to take these books to heart, it will never get itself into this
mess again. Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder
these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can
blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty
years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself
along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for
centuries. There's Hardy's Dynasts for example. When you read that
book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill,
nauseated--oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect
filtered into one's brain! It hurts! There's enough T. N. T. in that
book to blast war from the face of the globe. But there's a slow fuse
attached to it. It hasn't really exploded yet. Maybe it won't for
another fifty years.

"In regard to the War, think what books have accomplished. What was
the first thing all the governments started to do--publish books! Blue
Books, Yellow Books, White Books, Red Books--everything but Black
Books, which would have been appropriate in Berlin. They knew that
guns and troops were helpless unless they could get the books on their
side, too. Books did as much as anything else to bring America into
the war. Some German books helped to wipe the Kaiser off his throne--I
Accuse, and Dr. Muehlon's magnificent outburst The Vandal of Europe,
and Lichnowsky's private memorandum, that shook Germany to her
foundations, simply because he told the truth. Here's that book Men in
War, written I believe by a Hungarian officer, with its noble
dedication "To Friend and Foe." Here are some of the French
books--books in which the clear, passionate intellect of that race,
with its savage irony, burns like a flame. Romain Rolland's Au-Dessus
de la Melee, written in exile in Switzerland; Barbusse's terrible Le
Feu; Duhamel's bitter Civilization; Bourget's strangely fascinating
novel The Meaning of Death. And the noble books that