If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of
patriotism, their mother should be a patriot; and the love of
mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues springs, can only be
produced by considering the moral and civil interest of the race.
Woman should be prepared by education to become the companion of
man, or she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be
common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its
influence on general practise.

--_Mary Wollstonecraft_

[Illustration: WILLIAM GODWIN]

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