Churchill in 1918 in his essay on The American Contribution and the Democratic Idea, “wholly defensible from the point of view of international democracy.  Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile government, and that the Canal had become a necessity not only for our own development, but for that of the civilization of the world.”  And again:  “The only real peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth.”

Roosevelt himself could not have muddled an issue better.  Like him Mr. Churchill has habitually moved along the main lines of national feeling—­believing in America and democracy with a fealty unshaken by any adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence.  Morally he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naive and belated.  Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first and the critic afterwards.

And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed nearly a score of years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly striven to keep up with the world by thinking about it.  One novel after another has presented some encroaching problem of American civic or social life:  the control of politics by interest in Mr. Crewe’s Career; divorce in A Modern Chronicle; the conflict between Christianity and business in The Inside of the Cup; the oppression of the soul by the lust for temporal power in A Far Country; the struggle of women with the conditions of modern industry in The Dwelling-Place of Light.  Nothing has hurried Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken two or three years for each novel, has read widely, has brooded over his theme, has reinforced his stories with solid documentation.  He has aroused prodigious discussion of his challenges and solutions—­particularly in the case of The Inside of the Cup.  That novel perhaps best of all exhibits his later methods.  John Hodder by some miracle of inattention or some accident of isolation has been kept in his country parish from any contact with the doubt which characterizes his age.  Transferred to a large city he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in the fall begins relentless war against the unworthy rich among his congregation.  Thought plays but a trivial part in Hodder’s evolution.  Had he done any real thinking or were he capable of it he must long before have freed himself from the dogmas that obstruct him.  Instead he has drifted with the general stream and learns not from the leaders but from the slower followers of opinion.  Like the politician he absorbs through his skin, gathering premonitions as to which way the crowd is going and then rushing off in that direction.