We have nothing else like this book in America. It is the only living record of the suppressed minority, and is, as so often the case, the prophecy of that minority’s final triumph. Everything that Bourne wrote over two years ago has been vindicated by the event. A great chorus takes up now the song of this solitary, and like so many pioneers he has not lived to see his truth made into fact. This book is but the first of several. We shall have, under Van Wyck Brooks’s editorship, his volume of cultural essays, his reviews, and a “Life and Letters.” When the complete picture of Randolph Bourne emerges he will be seen as the pioneer spirit of his age, a symbol of our future. His place in the American tradition is secure. His life marks the beginning of our “coming-of-age.” This book relates to the war and the present crisis of the world. It does a great service for our country. Without it our showing would be weak and impoverished compared with the Older Nations. We may rejoice that as England had her Bertrand Russell, France her Rolland and Barbusse, Germany her Liebknecht and Nicolai, so America had her Randolph Bourne. CONTENTS EDITOR’S FOREWORD, 5 I--OLD TYRANNIES, 11 II--THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS, 22 III--BELOW THE BATTLE, 47 IV--THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY, 61 V--A WAR DIARY, 90 VI--TWILIGHT OF IDOLS, 114 VII--UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE STATE, 140 I OLD TYRANNIES (A Fragment, written in 1918.) When you come as an inhabitant to this earth, you do not have the pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career. You do not even have the privilege like those poor little shivering souls in “The Blue Bird,” of sitting about, all aware and wondering, while you are chosen, one by one to take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a helpless victim of your parents’ coming together. There is denied you even the satisfaction of knowing that they created you, in their own bungling fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of what they imagined an adequate child should be. On the contrary, you may be merely an accident, unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life of your mother, a drain upon the resources that were none too great already. And your parents have not only not conceived you as a work of art, but they are wholly incapable after you are born of bringing you up like a work of art.