Jourat anp Essiys or Joun Woorman.
Edited by Amelia Mott Gummere.
London: Macmillan and Ca. Pp.
xxii, 643, 25s. net.
In' this careful and scholarly volume we have the definitive edition of John Woolman's life and output. There is, first, a biography filled with every detail that time has spared of the man and his family connexions, with many facts and dates of no inherent interest, but collected with great care in the spirit less common in England than in America, where'a biography becomes, not a work of art and hardly literature, but a warehouse of classified facts. Next comes the famowés journal, collated from the three MSS. which Woolman wrote, and all variants are noted. In an appendix are well over a inundred biographical sketches of persons referred to. Finally there is a fuller collection of his essays than has hitherto been published, and an elaborate. bibliography.
John Woolman was a saint with a genius for clear simplicity and persuasive love, in the limited sphere of labour to which he was called, limited in range but pro found and penetrating, and as sorely needed as ever by the restless and selfish spirit of mankind. His work was to plead. against luxury and pride as contrary to pure wisdom and pure righteousness. He deduced the oppression of the poor from the superfluities of the rich, and so was a pioneer social reformer. His intuitive economics were wonderfully correct. Above all, he was a gentle (prophet, preaching everywhere against negro slavery. He had the delicate task of persuade ing his Quaker brethren to liberate their slaves, and he and a few others succeeded in clearing the Society of that abomination a century before general liberation was achieved. He practised with 2 tender conscience what he preached. Entertained at slave-holders' houses, he begged to be allowed to pay the slaves for their services; he never took sugar or other product of slave labour; he abandoned business when it brought him too much "cumber" and' too much money, and worked as a tailor and amateur scrivener. He travelled steerage to England because of the decorations in the Saloon. He preferred to wear undyed clothes, which, when ther reasonable or not, wae a type of his simple, cleam, and undyed character.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.