Excerpt from Essays in Freedom When I asked if I might dedicate to you this collection of scenes and essays, you told me with characteristic impetuosity and disinterestedness to dedicate them to the devil. And I confess the suggestion pleased me, for there is something very attractive - something, if I may say so, like yourself - in a spirit that rouses man from the unconditioned ease into which he so readily sinks, as the Lord says in the Prologue to "Faust." But after some hesitation between the two, I return to my original purpose. For it is on you rather than on any other power that the responsibility for the volume rests. I well remember the stormy March afternoon when I met you for the first time, in the rather unadventurous atmosphere of a Liberal club, which I had not visited before owing to my conservative tastes and revolutionary convictions. I was then helping to organise the "British Legion" in aid of the Greek people against the Sultan, and was on the point of going out with the Legion myself, because the action of Greece in defying the cautious selfishness of the Powers and sending a force to assist the Cretan rebels against Turkish despotism, appeared a fine and chivalrous thing. It still appears so to me, much as my opinion of the Greek government and the Turkish people has changed, and, like most fine and chivalrous things, it has in the end been entirely successful. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.