I do not now discern what at one time I feared that I might--carelessness, or an effect of haste, in the large mass of results to which this author has already put his name. On the contrary it seems to me that more and more he tends toward painstaking care, and there is good reason to predict that his best and possibly most brilliant work is yet to come. Regarding one work, since published, he has told me that, having already pushed a long way toward the end and finding that the affair went slowly, of a sudden it was borne in upon him that he was on the wrong track. In a moment he swept 30,000 words of manuscript into his basket and started anew and with a good heart. A great organizing capacity, a power of maintained effort, and a willingness to take unstinted trouble, render the large volume of his achievements as acceptable as the small bulk of another’s work. Faults I think Mr. Ford has had, and still has, but it would be proper even for the nicest criticism to discover a sure advance in the quality of his style. Personally I have never been able to explain satisfactorily the success of his most popular book, “The Honorable Peter Stirling.” It is almost without a “literary” quip or term or phrase; the politics present a stiff dose to novel readers, a class too satiated with an unvarying diet not to crave spicier viands than those served to them by the love motive of Mr. Ford’s story. Why then has this proved to be one of the three stories of the past two years and more? I do not know, unless it be that Mr. Ford, who is no egotist and not exclusive in his sympathies, reflects in this book a genuine if unsentimental faith in human nature of every degree. To such a faith humanity is always responsive. He did not come crying in the wilderness with acrimony and fanaticism, but gave the prototype of a gentleman of the heart and not of long ancestry--a pure man in all things, even in metropolitan politics, who stamped on evil, not shrank from it. There was a cry for a politician who could be something to the “boys” besides a prig, and Mr. Ford, _haud inexpertus_, produced him. It was bread and not a stone, and the democracy, rampant yet not unclean, heard him gladly.