Books: A Variety of Freedoms

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FOREVER FREEDOM—Josiah C. Wedgwood and Allan Nevins—Penguin Books (25¢).

This little book includes practically every important literary allusion that has ever been made to human freedom. These quotations, says Co-Editor Josiah Wedgwood (who last week was shushed by the British and sent home to Britain because he said unkind things about Isolationist Senator Wheeler), "furnish both sides of the Atlantic with Masonic passwords: quotations that will always be recognized by the elect." Among the great quotations the elect may recognize: II Corinthians iii, 17; John viii, 32; Psalm 140; the Golden Rule; Patrick Henry on liberty; the Declaration of Independence; Rule, Britannia; Byron's Sonnet on Chilian; Shelley's Masque of Anarchy; Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience; The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Among the great quotations about which the elect may need refreshing: King Ethelred's promise; extracts from the Magna Charta; the Virginia Bill of Rights; libertarian exhortations by J. S. Mill, Henry George, Wendell Phillips, Daniel Webster, Thomas Paine, Emerson, Milton, General Smuts, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt.

In his eloquent foreword British Laborite (pottery-maker and single taxer) Wedgwood also gives some shrewd reasons why he and Columbia University's Allan Nevins thought such an anthology worth compiling: "Though all my Labour colleagues regard Socialism as merely a stage on the road to that economic freedom which is our common goal, yet dependence on the State ever grows. A new master replaces the old masters. The mountain top is obscured, and those who have no vision tend to become willing cogs in the new bureaucratic machine. This machine . . . becomes a god whom it is blasphemy to criticize and criminal to obstruct. . . .

"A clerical and fascist school invokes humanity to denounce the inhumanity of 19th-Century liberalism, that we may forget the worse inhumanity of their own school from which liberalism freed us. ... It is time to restate the case for England and liberty; and it can best be done in double harness with those United States whose back is also to the wall."