Others may trace the love-tales of milkmaids and farmhands; I deal with the people who have made their mark upon the times; people who have tinted the world's thought-fabric and to whose genius we are all heirs. And the reason the story of their love is vital to us is because their love was vital to them. Thought is born of parents, and literature is the child of married minds. So this, then, is the love-story of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
History and literature are very closely related. If one sets down the chief events in political history, and over against these writes the names of the radical authors and orators of the time, he can not but be convinced that literature leads, and soldiers and politicians are puppets tossed on the tide of time. A thought, well expressed, is a bomb that explodes indefinitely.
Two men, Rousseau and Voltaire, lighted the fuse that created the explosion known as the French Revolution. Luther's books and sermons brought about the Reformation.
Thomas Paine's little book, "The Crisis," of which half a million copies were printed and distributed from Virginia to Maine, stirred the Colonists to the sticking-point; and George Washington, who was neither a writer nor an orator, paid "Letters and Truth" the tribute of saying, "Without the pamphlets of Thomas Paine the hearts and minds of the people would never have been prepared to respond to our call for troops." No one disputes now that it was a book written by a woman, of which a million copies were sold in the North, that prepared the way for Lincoln's call for volunteers.
Literature and oratory are arsenals that supply the people their armament of reasons. And through the use and exercise of these borrowed reasons, we learn to create new ones for ourselves. Thinkers prepare the way for thinkers, and every John the Baptist uttering his cry in the wilderness is heard.
And the fate of John the Baptist, and the fate of the Man whom he preceded, are typical of the fate of all who are bold enough to carry the standard of revolt into the camp of the entrenched enemy. The Cross is a mighty privilege; and only the sublimely great are able to pay the price at which hemlock is held.
Buddha said that the finest word in any language is "Equanimity." This is a paradox, and like every paradox implies that the reverse is equally true. Equanimity in the face of opposition, steadfastness in time of stress, and wise and useful purpose, are truly godlike.
And there is only one thing worth fighting for, talking for, or writing for; and all literature and all oratory have this for their central theme—Freedom. It was only Freedom that could lure Cincinnatus from his plow or Lincoln from his law-office.
And so Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "The Rights of Woman," was the first strong, earnest, ringing word on the subject. She summed up the theme once and for all, just as an essay by Herbert Spencer anticipates and answers every objection, exhausting the theme. And that the author had a whimsical touch of humor in her composition is shown in that she dedicates the book to that Prince of Woman-Haters, "Talleyrand, Late Bishop of Autun."
"Political Justice," by William Godwin, was published in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three. The work, on its first appearance, created a profound impression among English thinking people, although orthodoxy has almost succeeded in smothering it in silence since John Stuart Mill declared that this book created an epoch and deserved to rank with Milton's "Speech for Unlicensed Printing," Locke's "Essay on Human Understanding" or Jean Jacques' "Emile." That it was a positive force in Mill's own life he always admitted.