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He ends with the sort of message that drives the flawed and often inadequate heroes of these books to stand up and resist or speak truth to power: “Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.”

It is needless to say that the dead steersman has been reverently removed from the place where he held his honourable watch and ward till death—a steadfastness as noble as that of the young Casabianca—and placed in the mortuary to await inquest.

Excerpted in H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, the book became a cause célèbre when the New England Watch and Ward Society banned the issue in which it appeared.

“After being forcibly removed they were kept under watch and ward by the armed guards of M/s Vedanta and no outsider was allowed to meet them. They were effectively being kept as prisoners.”

Not long after the Luddites first sabotaged knitting machines in Nottinghamshire in 1811, a Watch and Ward group was established to protect against rioting gangs.