Preface

Any cause, good or bad, is dependent on a living, dynamic, current literature. Failing this, the movement atrophies and dies. Liberty has had a literature - the writings of Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Spencer, Jay, Madison, Hamilton, and a host of others. It was adequate for their times. At least, it could and did lay the intellectual base for history's greatest revolution, the revolutionary idea of a sovereign people and a servant govern ment. Also, it could and did release the greatest outburst of human energy ever known to man. But this literature, by and large, became ~~past tense," and repetition of it, regardless of how loud or often, cannot and does not stop the American Revolution from revolving toward an upside-down position of sovereign government and servant people. The literature of America's past does not speak in the terms of the current scene; and, as right as much of it is, it is not heeded.

Friends of liberty are obligated to help each other. The F01J)ndat~on for Economic Education was formed to serve as a clearing house for this mutual effort. Its purpose is to rewrite the best of the past in current grammar, to probe deeper into a philosophy never too well understood, to find new forms of clarity in explaining the freedom thesis, and to make its findings available ~n printed form to whoever asks for them. Some of the Foundation's publications are in the form of books and booklets. But much of the work is released in single sheet tracts, leaflet or pamphlet essays. This second volume of Essays on Liberty is a compilation of the8e smaller publications - a progress report, so to speak, for friends of liberty. LEONARD E. READ of the Foundation staff COMBATING STATISM by ofeonarlC. Real How can a person best prepare himself to combat trends toward statism? Finding the right answer to this question became an obsession with me in the early 1930's, and the obsession has in no way abated. I hope it never does.