And I watch the camels with the happy, dazed children on their backs, go by with soft and drifting feet.  Do I suppose I understand camels?  Or I follow the crowd.  I find myself at last with that huge, hushed, sympathetic congregation at the 4 P.M. service, watching the lions eat.

Everything does seem very much mixed up when one brings one’s Sociological Society dogmas, and one’s little neat, impeccable row of principles to the test of watching the lions eat!

Possibly people are as different from one another inside—­in their souls at least—­as different as these animals are.

It is true, of course, that as we go about, people do have a plausible way in this world—­all these other people, of looking like us.

But they are different inside.

If one could stand on a platform as one was about to speak and could really see the souls of any audience—­say of a thousand people—­lying out there before one, they would be a menagerie beside which, O Gentle Reader, I dare to believe, Barnum and Bailey’s menagerie would pale in comparison.

But in a menagerie (perhaps you have noticed it, Gentle Reader) one treats the animals seriously, and as if they were Individuals.

They are what they are.

Why not treat people’s souls seriously?

It is true that people’s souls, like the animals, are alike in a general way.  They all have in common (in spiritual things) organs of observation, appropriation, digestion and organs of self-reproduction.

But these spiritual organs of digestion which they have are theirs.

And these organs of self-reproduction are for the purpose of reproducing themselves and not us.

These are my reflections, or these try to be my reflections when I consider the Syndicalist—­how he grows or when I look up and see a class-war socialist—­an Upton Sinclair banging loosely about the world.

My first wild, aboriginal impulse with Upton Sinclair when I come up to him as I do sometimes—­violent, vociferous roaring behind his bars, is to whisk him right over from being an Upton Sinclair into being me.  I do not deny it.

Then I remember softly, suddenly, how I felt when I was watching the lions eat.

I remember the pelican.

Thus I save my soul in time.

Incidentally, of course, Upton Sinclair’s insides are saved also.

It is beautiful the way the wild beasts in their cages persuade one almost to be a Christian!

Of course when one gets smoothed down one always sees people very differently.  In being tolerant the rub comes usually (with me) in being tolerant in time.  I am tempted at first, when I am with Upton Sinclair, to act as if he were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs and of course (anybody would admit it) if he really were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs he would have to be wiped out.  There would be nothing else to do.  But he is not and it is not fair to him or fair to the world to act as if he were.