but the sentimental elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel toward villains.  It is much the same with his rather absurd novels written to display the follies of fashionable life, The Metropolis and The Moneychangers:  he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and premature decay.  Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many.

Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown—­standing ordinarily, however, on the side of the privileged orders.  Mr. Sinclair in The Jungle, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he could represent his characters as actually contending against the conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the exploited growing restless.  What outraged the public was the news, later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to lead if they got work—­which meant life to them—­at all.  Thanks to the conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of society, as Aristotle saw slavery.  Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal.

Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment when mankind determines that it need no longer endure.  He speaks as a socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and generous hopes.

How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between Manassas and 100%; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. Manassas is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter.