the injustices which ever since he
has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive
seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for
his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent
ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to
chronicle--if there had not been so much for him to discover--he must
have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought.

As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of
complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been
able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of
oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face
machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true
prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to
pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast
hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much
commentary in _Jimmie Higgins_ and _100%_ to the veritable episodes
which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus
of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool,
dangerous art of Thomas Paine.

To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers
among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes
like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive
passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has
written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or
complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr.
Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on
questioning it forever. _Samuel the Seeker_ seems a kind of allegory of
its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott,
inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that
something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged
philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly
and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that
justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and
cynical.

Naive inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities
for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress
when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take
refuge in irony when ag