Unpopular Opinions

I have called this collection of fugitive pieces "Unpopular Opinions," partly, to be sure, because to warn a person off a book is the surest way of getting him to read it, but chiefly because I have evidence that all the opinions expressed have in fact caused a certain amount of annoyance one way and the other. Indeed, the papers called "Christian Morality," "Forgiveness" and "Living to Work" were so unpopular with the persons who commissioned them that they were suppressed before they appeared: the first because American readers would be shocked by what they understood of it; the second because what the Editor of a respectable newspaper wanted (and got) was Christian sanction for undying hatred against the enemy; the third—originally intended for a Sunday evening B.B.C. "Postscript"—on the heterogeneous grounds that it appeared to have political tendencies, and that "our public do not want to be admonished by a woman."