I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man. There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for “Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries and have new enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he had not been introduced! Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to see many sides of life at once! Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved upon his monument: