To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw.  An expansive passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has written.  By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on questioning it forever. Samuel the Seeker seems a kind of allegory of its author’s own career.  He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that something or other be done at once.  These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and cynical.

Naive inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities for comfort.  How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress when a child may starve to death in a few days?  How can any one take refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending?  How can any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, who permit it to continue?  A questioner so relentless can very soon bore the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible.  Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist.  A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair’s better books can stay complacent only by shutting up the book and his mind again.

Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice.  It is perhaps not to be wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has himself, as his personal history in The Brass Check makes clear enough, been practically conspired against.  But some instinct for melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention.