From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully considered and fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the "_Journal de Genève_" should be reproduced in the French press), the ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual. For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the invisible Europe. Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made available in the volumes _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ and _Les précurseurs_, be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to mind the frenzy of the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal, that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that _Au-dessus de la mêlée_, whose trend already seems to us a matter of course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as