The moment I see he is confining himself to just being Upton Sinclair I rather like him.

It is the same with Ella Wheeler Wilcox.  It is when I fall to thinking of her as if she were, or were in danger of being, a whole world of Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes that I grow intolerant of her.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox as a Tincture, which is what she really is, of course, is well enough.  I do not mind.

The real truth about a man like Upton Sinclair, when one has worked down through to it, is that while from my point of view a class-war socialist—­a man who proposes to put society together by keeping men apart—­is wrong and is sure to do a great deal of harm to some people, there are other people to whom he does a great deal of good.

There really are people who need Upton Sinclair.  It may be a hard fact to face perhaps, but when one faces it one is glad there is one.  Some of the millionaires need Sinclair.  There are others whose attention would be attracted better in more subtle ways.

The class-war socialist, though I may be at this moment in the very act of trying to make him impossible, to put him out of date, has been and is, in his own place and his own time, I gratefully acknowledge, of incalculable value.

Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make rich, tired, mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechanical-minded people wake up enough to feel hateful has performed a public service.  The hatefulness is the beginning of their being covetous for other things than the things they have.  If a man has a habit of hunger he gets better and better hungers as a matter of course; bread and milk, ribbons, geraniums, millinery, bathtubs, Bibles, copartnership associations.  And in the meantime the one precious thing to be looked out for in a man, and to be held sacred, is his hunger.

The one important religious value in the world is hunger and to all the men to-day who are contributing to the process of moving on hungers; whether the hungers happen to be our hungers or not or our stages of hunger or not, we say Godspeed.

There are times when the sudden sense one comes to have that the world is a struggle, a great prayer toward the sun, a tumult and groping of desire, the sense that every kind and type of desire has its time and its place in it and every kind and type of man, gives a whole new meaning to life.  This sense of a now possible toleration which we come to have, some of us, opens up to us always when it comes a new world of courage about people.  It makes all these dear, clumsy people about us suddenly mean something.  It makes them all suddenly belong somewhere.  They become, as by a kind of miracle, bathed in a new light, wrong-headed, intolerable though they be, one still sees them flowing out into the great endless stream of becoming—­all these dots of the vast desire, all these queer, funny, struggling little sons of God!

It has been overlooked that social reform primarily is not a matter of legislation or of industrial or political systems, or of machinery, but a matter, of psychology, of insight into human nature and of expert reading and interpretation of the minds of men.  What are they thinking about?  What do they think they want?