Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to issues that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he should seem not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher discoursing with men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of progress, but that he should seem to be a contemporary with a touch of conservatism, crying with other average men for Prohibition and vituperating with them our one-time Teutonic enemies. My reader, are you now chiding me for drawing an unsympathetic portrait? Recall then one of the pieces in _Americans_ (1922) and then say, if you can, that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am wrong. The piece in evidence is _An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More_, wherein, after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman complained: “But he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen.” In fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating statement, “Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his substance arrives.”[64] It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him to be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s rôle than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values, then as is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values. Consider the following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More had loved the aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went on, “Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be a leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman, that Socrates at his trial spoke of his brief experience in politics and explained scathingly why he had thereafter abstained from politics, I say that what has occurred here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication of two men so uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply critical of us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be, to put it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of cant. “If ‘P. E.