Strike through the pathos and the tragedy of O. Henry at any point, and what do you find? Everywhere and inevitably one thing, the Big Business system of America. Here is a waitress in a restaurant with white porcelain walls and glass-topped tables and a ceaseless clatter of crockery. Yes, it is pathetic for a girl to carry loads of crockery all day, and try to keep virtuous on a starvation wage. Then close the O. Henry book, and consult Moody’s Manual of Corporations, and you discover that the great chain of restaurants has been bought by Standard Oil; America’s “great clamorer for dividends” has doubled the prices of the food without improving its quality, and has failed to raise wages to keep pace with the cost of living. Or take James Turner, who presses hats all day and has to stand on his feet, which makes them sore; he finds his escape in reading Clark Russell’s sea-tales, and having got a copy, he is happy even in jail. Consult a study of the sweated trades, and you note that hat pressing is a secondary and parasitic industry, incapable of being organized; therefore the poor devil has no one to protect his sore feet. A part of his equipment is a jeering scorn for those who are striving to enlighten him. “Say,” he asks, “do I look like I’d climbed down one of them missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?” That is his way of saying that he has no vision of a better world; it is O. Henry’s idea of being a sociologist. (If you have any curiosity concerning Helicon Hall and its fire-escapes, the story is in “The Brass Check.”) The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen, O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your trouble and can help you to escape it. The Four Million will have to look elsewhere than to O. Henry for that head.