Excerpt from The Road to Freedom: And What Lies Beyond Independent thought has been made easier for the most timid of us by the great original thinkers of the last fifty years, who have shown the way and borne the brunt of the hostility that departure from tradition often arouses. Giants like Leo Tolstoy, Henry George, Pierre Kropotkin, and others whose names are little known, have made free thought on social matters possible to our generation. The only service that men of smaller stature can hope to render is to clear away still more of the mental and material rubbish that obstructs the road to a true civilisation. We have tried to express in this book our personal answer to the question What's wrong with the world Our thanks are due to all our argumenta tive friends, who by their disputations have helped us to form and to clarify our own Opinions. We also offer our sincere thanks to the Editor of The Open Road, in which most of these chapters were first published. 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.