The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove. How to explain this? There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their own bad causes. But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books) there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of “system.” A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end? What I mean is this. I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance. I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues. I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!” But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.” And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.