M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the _religion of democracy_, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; etc.”[65] In the lexicon of contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase, “unselective sympathy.” I think it applies to what Sherman meant when he said “religion of democracy,” else why does he base so much of his message on the statistical average man? He could, like Mr. More, have appealed to the latent common sense of man, which is not a visible property of the average man to-day any more than it characterises his leaders, or he could, like M. Charles Maurras, have tried to conceive clearly of a perfect and normal man and argued for a closer approach to normality in human affairs;[66] but no--there was working in Sherman an element of “unselective sympathy” and it made his grasp relax on enterprises of perfection. It was no divine average man he espoused. When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York _Herald Tribune_, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our milieu sorely lacks, a vigorous _conservative_ literary review. But what he organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal review with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were, for instance, already identified as reviewers for the _Nation_. We have followed Sherman from the academic world to the professional literary world, and it would seem to a superficial glance that Sherman changed remarkably in his transit from one to the other. He had been an assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism: he was to praise _An American Tragedy_. He had sneered, and not very well, at the “moderns”: he was to become their friendly counsellor. He had learned, he said, that it was a certain “vitality,” no matter under what guise, that he wanted in letters, and this platform enabled him to do a great deal of explaining away of his altered views. He became less provincial.