BOOKS WILL BURN. National leaders who seek to enforce their personal ideas sometimes command the people to put the torch to certain literature. This has happened in Germany, in an age which we have boastfully called enlightened. It is like going back to the dark ages to read of this attempt by Adolph Hitler to dictate German thought. Those bonfires, flaring up in public squares from one end of Germany to the other, may have seemed to the Nazis like beacon fires of a new day, a day in which everything "non-German" is to be destroyed. Hitler determined to burn up every book which did not conform to his notions. But in reality the bonfires signaled hopeless defeat for Hitlerism. Applying the torch to literature is the most futile of all ways of seeking to dominate a people. It has been tried before, over and over. Roman emperors and Spanish inquisitors have tried it, Russian czars and French kings attempted it; prelates and dictators have used the method, but it never worked. Books have been burned and their authors have been burned with them; all the resources of great kingdoms have been enlisted to stamp out ideas that rulers did not like; and nothing of permanance has been accomplished. The fight against an idea, against a book, against a song, is one fight in which ultimate failure is written in the stars. When a man gives a book to the world, provided it is a book which possesses some real value, and is not merely a tale told to amuse idle minds, that book will live. All the fires of the bottomless pits cannot destroy it. To be sure, you can take a book and burn it. You can seize the author and burn him too, and you can send soldiers with glistening bayonets into the homes of those who are found reading the book or talking about it. But you accomplish nothing, aside from adding momentarily to the world's stock of pain and its list of heroes. The thing you fought against will go on working. Your bonfires will die down and their ashes will grow cold; but the flame that was the book itself will keep on burning as long as men anywhere need its light. Hitler, there is no use telling your people that they shall not read. The good thoughts contained between the covers of their books cannot be annihilated by any weapon man has ever fashioned.