s-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting
fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown--standing ordinarily,
however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in _The
Jungle_, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with
the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he
could represent his characters as actually contending against the
conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the
exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news,
later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part
of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under
conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the
spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to
lead if they got work--which meant life to them--at all. Thanks to the
conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to
the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion,
which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of
society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a
ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the
revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come,
still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal.

Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than
his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the
pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all
that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment
when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a
socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present
them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and
generous hopes.

How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in
the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the
range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a
generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories
and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic
principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw
splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite
of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the Ameri