"Deschars was the child of his time. He had gone about the world as a disinterested beholder, and he returned from voyaging without any keen desire for noble action. . . . Perhaps, if he had been living and working for some great human object, Deschars would have carried Claude away by the very authority of his purpose, without a word. . . ." And Madame de Fourchamps observes: "It is very lucky for the poor that there are rich people to give them bread." To which Claude replies: "My father's factory provides these workmen with a livelihood; where would they be without him?" Then, instead of a few plain words on labour-value, Puymaufray can only reply: "Well, they give him something in exchange, don't they?" The old capitalist fallacies here uttered in their crudest form cannot be refuted by mere injunctions to pity and goodwill; and even the magnificent words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are no adequate reply. To the successful profiteer and all who acquiesce in his domination they mean: Liberty of Enterprise, Equality of Opportunity, and Fraternity among Exploiters. Facts and the march of events alone can persuade Dominique Harlé and his like to use their ingenuity in serving their fellow-creatures, and not in profiting by them. And only collective action, guided by some knowledge of the direction in which our civilisation is tending, can hasten the march of events. It is remarkable how greatly the "novel with a purpose" has developed during the last twenty years in England and, to a less extent, in France. The characters are creatures of their conditions; and it is these conditions, not the characters, that do the talking. Some novels to-day are such careful and withal highly interesting guides to the sociology of England towards the end of the black Industrial Age that we cannot wonder if their authors take themselves too seriously as politicians and reformers. Yet these works show, after all, the same defect as _Les Plus Forts_, they have no constructive theory of life to set against the very well-defined, solid, and still apparently effective system which they criticise. All their most ironic descriptions, their most penetrating satire are negative, and, in the end, the utterances of men "wandering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born."