"Forever Freedom"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 4

"Forever Freedom"

NCE before on this page we have named a Penguin book that could with advantage be issued to every soldier. Now, a year later, we name another: Forever Freedom, by Josiah Wedgwood and Allan Nevins. Freedom, we know, is a_ two-edged sword that neither children nor fools may safely play with; but the compilers of this collection do not play with it. They handle it with a masterly and lofty skill. They are idealists, with a firm faith in the perfectibility of human nature; see mankind on the march "from the animal to the divine"; and insist that freedom to choose is essential to progress. In whatever words we express it most of us share that faith, and we have slipped a long way from grace if this book does not strengthen our faith. It is stimulating, to begin with, to realise how deeply liberty is ingrained in English and American minds, for of all the passages quoted in these two hundred and fifteen pages the only extracts not originally written in English are from the Bible. From the Great Charter ("We will sell to no one, we will deny or defer to no one, right and justice") to the most recent speeches of Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt we have a continuous variation on that great theme. And by variation we mean variation. There are members in this shining company whose love of liberty pushes them near to anarchy: Henry David Thoreau, for example, whose essay on Civil Disobedience. carries individualism straight into jail. Others, though less unbending, strike a higher note than most of us can reach or follow: Milton, for example, with his insistence on the "right to think, to know, and to utter," and Wendell Phillips when he says that "the community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinion, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves." It would be foolish to deny that these at present are what the Bible calls hard sayings. They are true, but they give truth a disturbing, and to some of us an alarming appearance. That, however, is the case with most of the convictions by which the best men are ruled. They lead into difficult country, and it depends on our strength as well as on our courage whether we go, or should go, all the way. We must go as far as we can, and in the case of liberty we have little reason as a nation to be ashamed of the position we now occupy. It is not easy and sometimes in fact not possible, to keep our deeds in line with our words, but the better our words are in general the better our actions will be, and the purpose of this anthology is to get the prophets of liberty, and their words, into the very fibre of our being.