Author’s Note

Most of the matter in this book has appeared in the Saturday Evening Post during the last twelve months, though not exactly in the same form; and here the sequence is inverted, so that the view is from the present backward. Magazine articles that have been written to stand alone do not as a rule make a coherent whole for purposes of a book; on the other hand, pieces that were meant to be parts of a book may want that value of being current which a magazine article does like to possess. The merit of this arrangement, if any, is that you have a book of uncemented parts, any one of which may be taken by itself. Or take this to be a collected series of pamphlets, each of which is excited by certain phases of a subject that by reason somewhat of its own nature and somewhat of our ignorance about it is, in fact, formless.

G. G.

June 1, 1932