ony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can
any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the
responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors,
who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore
the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed
than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but
this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are
impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this
boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent
to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the
reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any
of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up
the book and his mind again.

Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their
case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair
scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be
wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has
himself, as his personal history in _The Brass Check_ makes clear
enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for
melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of
conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention.

In _Love's Pilgrimage_, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the
fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself
heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same
quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years
between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling
is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be
devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no
such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel
disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with
powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant
genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill
and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but
those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in _The Profits of
Religion_--which is to the present age what _The Age of Reason_ was to
an earlier revolutionary generation--Mr. Sinclair exces