"The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must appeal. Take any big question of public importance--after it has been discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last decide it. "A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work. "Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people who believe as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of these days. "It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers--it will make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action. Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions, and the writers must overcome this inertia. "The writers must stir up the politicians and the people. There's been a whole lot of mush written about peace. There always will be war. We can't reform the world. "The pacifists say that it is useless to arm because war cannot be prevented by armaments. The obvious answer to that is that neither can the failure to arm prevent war. And the verdict after the war will be better if we are prepared for it. The writers must call our attention to the folly of leaving ourselves open to attack. "It's hard to reach the conscience of the American people on any big issue. We are too independent, too indifferent, too ready to slump back. That's one of the penalties of democracy, I suppose; the national sense of patriotism becomes atrophied. It needs some whaling-big jolt to wake it up. Every American writer can help to do this. "The trouble is that we have too many men with feminine minds, too many of these delicate fellows with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. I can't imagine any women with ideas more feminine than those of Bryan--could any woman evolve anything more feminine than his peace-at-any-price idea?" Mr. Beach smiled. "I suppose I should not be talking about world politics," he said. "There are so many men who have specialized in that subject and are therefore competent to talk about it. I am only a specialist in writing." "Do you think," I asked, "that writers should be specialists in writing? Some people believe that the best fiction, for example, is produced by men who do some other work for a living."