Mr. Hunter has performed an important and much-needed work in giving a popular and fascinating panoramic view of one of the most momentous and significant politicoeconomic movements in the history of social

evolution. It is a work calculated to remove many false impressions while adding immensely to the information of the general reader. B. O. FLOWER.

UPTON

I.

PTON SINCLAIR is first of all an historian or chronicler of society as it is; an analyst whose one master thought is to hold the mirror up before civilization in its varying phases in such a way that they who have eyes and ears cannot fail to behold as in a vivid panorama just what is going on at the present. That he possesses a strong and vivid imagination, an imagination that is the hall-mark of genius, no one can doubt who has read Manassas or The Jungle; yet his forte is not in invention, but rather in the power of visualization which enables him to seize upon and portray scenes, events, plans and purposes as vividly as if he had not only actually witnessed them but had been a participant in them.

When The Jungle appeared, critics and the general readers alike declared it to be a powerful piece of imaginative work, but with general unanimity it was declared to be a slander on the great beef companies whose master spirits had long posed as safe and sane and eminently respectable leaders in the business world. The author was roundly denounced because it was claimed that his work might be taken seriously by the people and thus do great harm because it misrepresented the beef magnates. Those who, like Mr. Sinclair, had personally investigated the beef trust's infamous doings, as well as the army of its employés, knew The Jungle to be first of all history; knew that it was a closely-woven web of actual facts susceptible of proof. True, it was a remarkable piece of imaginative work, because in it the author had so vividly por

The Money-Changers." By Upton Sinclair. Cloth. Pp. 316. Price, $1.50. New York: B. W. Dodge & Company.

trayed in a concrete way the double infamy of one of the most immoral and conscienceless

monopolies known to history; had shown its essential criminality as shadowed forth in its feeding the people with filthy, drugged and oftentimes diseased and tainted meat, and its inhumanity to its employés, in such a compelling way that it was vividly brought home to the consciousness of the millions. Mr. Sinclair had constructed a novel by weaving together a vast array of demonstrable facts, velt, who expected to utterly discredit the as was clearly proved after President Rooseso-called "muck-raker," sent his commission to investigate the facts, and that commission substantiated the awful truths presented in the book.

II.

In Mr. Sinclair's latest novel, The MoneyChangers, we have another sectional view of the modern social inferno produced by the feudalism of privileged wealth, which is rising on the ruins of the Republic established by

the fathers. The scenes have been shifted

from the stock-yards of Chicago to the great metropolis, but here again we have history rather than fiction. All the great or important facts of this book are, we are informed, either historically accurate or a reproduction of facts similar to those narrated in the book.

As a novel, The Money-Changers is a better book than The Metropolis, but it is far inferior to either Manassas, Mr. Sinclair's first important work of fiction, or to The Jungle. In reading The Metropolis, which is or should be part one of Mr. Sinclair's picture of metropolitan social and business life, one feels that he is perusing a story prepared hastily, not in

regard to the facts treated but rather their method of presentation. It is too sketchy, too much the modern pen-picture of the newspaper reporter or journalist. It lacks the delicate touches and the detail that make a work take vital hold of the reader and live in his imagination. Manassas and The Jungle have in no small degree these elements that are necessary to a work that is to live as literature. The Metropolis is conspicuously weak in this particular, and to a less degree the same fact is apparent in The Money-Changers. Had the author spent a year more on these two works, he might have given the world a romance great as Zola's Paris or Rome, a work that would have taken a permanent place in the literature of the New World. Few of our present-day novelists possess the powerful imaginative insight, the artistic or poetic power of visualization, in the degree enjoyed by Mr. Sinclair. Few novelists can take the material facts of present-day life and weave them into a story more convincing and true in fact, detail and spirit. Hence it is the more regrettable that with this splendid gift, the author should not take the necessary time, even though at great personal sacrifice, to make his novels great masterpieces which would live in literature and at the same time drive home the terrible facts with which he deals in such a way as to awaken a nation, as did the author in The Jungle, and as did Dickens and Charles Reade in their great works.

In making this criticism, however, we do not wish to convey the idea that The Metropolis and The Money-Changers are books of no special interest or value. Both are highly interesting stories written in the bright, clearcut and entertaining style of the modern journalist, and both give remarkably vivid sectional views of metropolitan life, especially that part which in so sinister a way is influencing the moral ideals of the people while parasite-like feeding on their sustenance through the protection or shelter of a recreant government and opinion-forming influences which it already largely controls.

III.

The Money-Changers is a novel that all persons interested in the nation's weal, and especially those who are laboring under the one-time popular delusion that the lords of the money and the market, or the business world which operates in Wall street are safe,

sane, moral or respectable citizens, should read. For in this volume we are taken into the inner chamber of the high financiers. We see the Morgans, the Ryans, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Rogerses and their confederates plying their nefarious trade, plotting and plundering in secret after they have deliberately deceived the public. In short, we behold the moral criminality of Wall street as one sees it who is one of the inner circle of the "malefactors of great wealth," to use Mr. Roosevelt's favorite term.

This, however, is but one picture here presented. Mr. Sinclair has displayed much artistic ability in the effective contrasts he introduces. Thus, from the splendid offices of the Wall-street magnates, he takes us to the great steel works operated by some of these same magnates, whose fabulous wealth is being squandered in all kinds of extravagances and oftentimes in revolting excesses and moral crimes. In the steel works we are brought face to face with the terrible conditions of the wage-slaves who make the steel, the pitiful state of the workers; and while here we suddenly witness one of those frightfully tragic deaths so common among the workers, where a man is mangled and slain because the masters of the works are not willing to make the protection of life of greater concern than the garnering of a few more dollars into their already over-swollen treasure vaults. The death here described is a vivid picture of one of a score or more similar deaths the facts of which the author himself personally investigated some time since-deaths that were needless and that at one fell stroke robbed wife and children of husband, parent and support. And the young man who witnesses it turns with sick heart from the scene to New York. Arriving in the metropolis, he finds the parties in whose service he is engaged to be in Newport; hence he joins them, and here again we have a startling contrast. The portrayal of the toilers in the great mills, whose families are barely able to eke out a miserable existence and whose children are frequently compelled to help in the labor of sustaining the family, while the lives of the workers are sacrificed with little concern, is placed in juxtaposition to a vivid pen-picture of the ultra-rich beneficiaries whose wives and daughters are squandering the wealth that would make thousands of workers independent, self-respecting and full of hope, in a hollow round of frivolity that ends in ennui or something much worse.

Here true art is evinced in these contrasts, and the effect on the reader is thought-compelling. It drives home the great vital fact that the law of solidarity is immutable and relentless. While there is oppression and injustice at the bottom, the greatness of life, its richness, fragrance and fruitfulness in all that makes for true happiness, development and worth, are impossible at the top. In their places we find restlessness, unsatisfied longing, the development of the baser passions of jealousy, envy, hatred and ignoble desires. Then there is the hectic flush instead of the rose blush of moral sanity; the feverish excitement that ends in bitterness and weariness, instead of the exhiliration that follows noble service and worthy work. Here is money-worship as the master motive of life, and egoism at its apogee; an inferno at the summit, the result of the inferno at the base; society shallow and corrupt because it defies the law of life and growth as taught by the Great Nazarene.

Nor is this all. The life of the great Wallstreet gamblers, high financiers and masters of watered stock and monopolies that extort untold millions from the wealth-producing and consuming multitude, is a life "based on the crumbling rock of self-desire," and thus it is not fortified against the master passions that pull men downward when they become the controlling factors of life. In a few instances animal passions are completely subordinated to the mania for accumulating gold and the desire for the power it gives; but this form of moral insanity is usually companioned by the dominance of gross animal passions, appetites and desires. Very vivid and circumstantial is the portrayal of the lust of the woman-hunter of the world of high finance. Perhaps the case of Dan Waterman, who

organized the steel trust, who is the master of Wall street's finances, and who passes the plate in the church on Lord's Day--a man whose unearned millions have made him a master in state, in church and in society, presents the most striking example of unbridled lust. Especially is the author circumstantial in his description of the attempted rape on the palatial yacht owned by the magnate, of Lucy, one of the leading characters in the story, by this master of the feudalism of high finance and privileged wealth. But this incident is not an isolated example of the moral depravity in regard to women that goes hand in hand with the utter defiance of the fundamentals of justice, honor, integrity and old-time business virtue that characterizes the world of Wallstreet finance.

The Money-Changers gives a detailed story of the late panic. Its characters are living, struggling men and women. Its scenes are the scenes not of the imagination, but the portrayal of incidents that have taken place and are taking place in the world of New York parvenue aristocracy. It is more history than romance. Indeed, it is the blending in story form and in a remarkably graphic narrative, of a chain of facts so that one obtains a panoramic view of the money-changers, their work and some of the results of the same. It is, as we have observed, too sketchy and wanting in finish and detail which time and patient toil would have added; but even with its shortcomings, The Money-Changers is one of the most convincing and absorbing novels of the season, and it is one of the most vivid and accurate pictures of the world of Wall-street financiers and corporation and trust magnates that has appeared. B. O. FLOWER.

Boston, Massachusetts.

OCKEFELLER, Harriman and Roosevelt are happy. Carnegie, Morgan, Armour and Baer are delighted. The "malefactors of great wealth," the Wall-street communism of gamblers and high financiers are rejoicing as are the reactionary forces that have for years been consolidating and uniting with the bosses and the corrupt privilege-seeking element to stay the tide of democratic advance in the great Republic. With ten dollars at their command to where the Democrats had one dollar; with every great public opinionforming organ and influence that could be controlled by corporations or corrupt wealth working for the election of Mr. Taft or coldly supporting Mr. Bryan; with the rich malefactors pouring money into the Republican Congressional Committee's coffers as well as the treasury of the National Committee; while Mr. Roosevelt was beating his tom-toms and striving to divert the attention of the overcredulous voters from the activity in favor of his candidate of the privilege-seeking cormorants from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and while Mr. Hearst in the rear was stabbing at the only candidate that could possibly be elected who boldly stood for the people's rule against the rule of corrupt machines operated by privileged wealth, it is not surprising that Mr. Taft should have been elected, though it is regrettable that the majorities were so decisive.

The defeat of Mr. Bryan will, we believe, hasten the great battle between the merciless and conscienceless oligarchy of privileged wealth and the people, but it will render the possibility of the people's triumph in a peaceable manner far less probable than if the great Commoner had been elected. It was the realization of this fact and the conviction that the most important of all issues for immediate settlement was whether the people should rule or whether the oligarchy of privileged wealth operating through corrupt bosses and machines should continue to be the master of the nation, that led us to so earnestly support Mr. Bryan. We do not for a moment despair of the future. We believe that we have entered a revolu

tionary epoch, a battle between the people and privilege, not unlike that inaugurated by the democratic era, and one that shall complement the great victory of political independence by giving to industry economic independence; but we believe that the hope for an evolutionary or peaceful triumph is far less bright to-day than it would have been had Mr. Bryan been elected. For now the repressive and despotic measures already inaugurated during recent years will be pushed forward under every conceivable plausible guise and pretence. A systematic effort will be made to increase the army, to bulwark plutocracy at every turn, and to nullify as far as possible actual popular rule. This will be part of the terrible price that the American people will pay for allowing the plutocracy and the reactionists to win the great battle that has just been fought in the Republic.

The victory of plutocracy marks a crucial period in the history of the Republic-a period not unlike that witnessed on the night when Charles Sumner made his memorable speech-the night of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act. From now on it will be a battle to the finish between fundamental democracy and class-rule masquerading under a thin guise of republican form but operated by a ruling class in the service of privileged wealth.

Never has it been so important as at the present hour for all the friends of economic justice, of fundamental democracy and free institutions or the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, to unite on a common ground and wage unceasing warfare against reaction, despotism and class-rule.

The opposition is strong. Its majority is large. This, however, is going to prove an element of weakness, and the imperative duty devolving on the friends of just and free government at this crisis is to unite, manifesting breadth of spirit and tolerance toward all within their own lines, while concentrating their every effort against the enemies of democracy, the upholders of class-rule and reaction. We repeat, we do not despair of the future,