It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author
can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by
unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of
temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness
that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his
fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But _The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists_ is a book to be read by any who want an
insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with
its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties.

* * * * *

Mr. Grant-Watson is one of the most resolute and intrepid novelists I
have met, and his directness of speech may give offence, I fear, to the
more reticent of his readers. His story of two white men and _Alice
Desmond_, freed from the social conventions and let loose among the
natives on a remote island in the Pacific, proceeds apace and with
little regard for the susceptibilities of civilisation and refinement.
Familiar but rarely printed language is used when occasion demands;
primitive passions stalk naked and unashamed; and when murder is to be
done it is done brutally, forthwith and notwithstanding the respective
merits, from an heroic point of view, of active and passive agents.
Being myself so situated in life that I am never likely to take part in
any affair more passionate and drastic than a football match or a
law-suit, I found the savage reality, the candour and the unbridled
wrath of _Where Bonds are Loosed_ (Duckworth) most welcome by contrast.
It gave me pleasure to see a man's annoyance being worked off by the use
of fists, knives and bullets, a woman's impatience spending itself in
immediate violence, and love and hatred being expressed in sharp and
decisive action rather than in deliberate subtleties of conversation. In
short, Mr. Watson left me wondering, somewhat fondly, to what lengths I
myself might go in my more heated moments if I too were isolated on
Kanna Island and beyond the supervision of police-constables and
next-door neighbours.

* * * * *

Once upon a time it was my lot to read a slender volume of Prose Poems,
all about stars and rivers and moons and such other things of which
prose poetry is made, and written by the most intense and soulful young
woman who ever put pen to paper. Which, being perused, I handed to
another and