that if any gentleman could come back
to us from the seventeenth century, he would be less astonished
by the novel sights he would see than by the old familiar sights
he would miss. He would see no one standing in the pillory, no
one being burnt at a stake, no one being "swum" for witchcraft,
no one's veracity being tested by torture, and, above all, no
hangman burning books at Cheapside, no unfortunate authors being
flogged all the way from Fleet Street to Westminster. The absence
of these things would probably strike him more than even the
railways and the telegraph wires. Returning with his old-world
ideas, he would wonder how life and property had survived the
removal of their time-honoured props, or how, when all fear of
punishment had been removed from the press, Church and State were
still where he had left them. Reflecting on these things, he
would recognise the fact that he himself had been living in an
age of barbarism from which we, his posterity, were in process of
gradual emergence. What vistas of still further improvement would
not then be conjured up before his mind!_

_We can hardly wonder at our ancestors burning books when we
recollect their readiness to burn one another. It was not till
the year 1790 that women ceased to be liable to be burnt alive
for high or for _petit_ treason, and Blackstone found nothing to
say against it. He saw nothing unfair in burning a woman for
coining, but in only hanging a man. "The punishment of _petit_
treason," he says, "in a man is to be drawn and hanged, and in a
woman to be drawn and burned; the idea of which latter punishment
seems to have been handed down to us by the ancient Druids, which
condemned a woman to be burnt for murdering her husband, and it
is now the usual punishment for all sorts of treasons committed
by those of the female sex." Not a suspicion seems to have
crossed the great jurist's mind that the supposed barbarity of
the Druids was not altogether a conclusive justification for the
barbarity of his own contemporaries. So let us take warning from
his example, and let the history of our practice of book-burning
serve to help us to keep our minds open with regard to anomalies
which may still exist amongst us, descended from as suspicious an
origin, and as little supported by reason._

CONTENTS.

PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER I. SIX