noble phrase and generality, and so ignorant of the past and of the poor—­in the midst of such a century the Social Contract was born at the due time.  Add the vivid imagination and the genuine love for his fellow-men, to which Lord Morley told us Maine attributed Rousseau’s ineffaceable influence on history, and we are shown some of the qualities and reasons that now and again make words burn with that effulgence, and give even to a book the power of a deed.

Lord Morley thought there might be a score, or perhaps even a hundred, of such books in political literature.  He himself gave two other instances beside the Social Contract.  He mentioned The Institutions of the Christian Religion, of Calvin, “whose own unconquerable will and power to meet occasion made him one of the commanding forces in the world’s history.”  And he mentioned Tom Paine’s Common Sense as “the most influential political piece ever composed.”  I could not, offhand, give a list of seventeen other books of similar power to make up the score.  I do not believe so many exist, and as to ninety-seven, the idea need not be considered.  There have been books of wide and lasting political influence—­Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Civil Government, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Paine’s Right of Man, Mill’s Liberty and The Subjection of Women, Green’s Political Obligation, and many more.  But these are not burning books in the sense in which the Social Contract was a burning book.  With the possible exception of The Subjection of Women, they were cool and philosophic.  With the possible exception of Machiavelli, their writers might have been professors.  The effect of the books was fine and lasting, but they were not aflame.  They did not rank as acts.  The burning books that rank as acts and devour like purifying fire must be endowed with other qualities.

Such books appear to have been very few, though, in a rapid survey, one is likely to overlook some.  In all minds there will arise at once the great memory of Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, passionately uttering the simple but continually neglected law that “all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”  Carlyle’s French Revolution and Past and Present burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin’s Unto this Last and the series of Fors Clavigera; so did Mazzini’s God and the People, Karl Marx’s Kapital, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, Tolstoy’s What shall we do? and so did Proudhon’s Qu’est ce que la Propriete? at the time of its birth.  Nor from such a list could one exclude Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by which Mrs. Beecher Stowe anticipated the deed of Harper’s Ferry nine years before it came.