The genius with the gift for fiction such as had Tolstoy, Balzac or Smollett can encase civilization within the covers of a book. You may read and understand. There is something static. You live a thousand lives by proxy, you enter a hundred homes and have converse with the hearts of men and women. Instead of seeing but the front of things, we walk behind and take in life from every angle. The characters in the drama of life are under a microscope through which we are privileged to look. Tolstoy presents life as it was in Russia forty years ago, but human hearts that are cosmopolitan and eternal, Balzac, the France of the forties, Smollett, England of the eighteenth century. We learn the ideals, the struggles, the way of life of different civilizations, of different ages. We find that our point of view is a narrow one, that our place in the Sun is perhaps a very small corner, and our hearts and minds are enlarged to a deeper sympathy with all men, a finer understanding of all ideals and practices. Instead of living in the little village of our own outlook, instead of weighing all experience and action by our own, we arrive at a higher, more cosmopolitan point of view. Whereas we might think that ours is the only century in which people flock to the cities and live material lives of rush and money-grabbing, we find the same thing true of Smollett’s England of one hundred and fifty years ago; instead of condemning the woman who cannot get along with her husband we have a broader sympathy for having followed the career of the splendid Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s novel of that name. We break the shell of our petty selves which has made for so many misunderstandings and prejudices. We must not pride ourselves upon our own motives and civilization, until we have at least made an attempt to understand those of others. Since the days when Nathaniel Hawthorne condensed the spiritual aspects of New England in his immortal "Scarlet Letter," there has been a scarcity of American novels of any high realistic calibre. Ernest Poole has recently done brilliant work in "The Harbor," in which he presents the ideals that have guided a young man of our day and generation. Yet, here we are, in a strange world indeed—the greatest spirits hurling themselves into the strife of ninety-mile-an-hour living, only to be tossed aside to make way for younger and harder workers, more efficient thinkers. The strange growling beast of a great American city, the wide acres of efficient irrigated farming, with the workers in each, have yet even partially to be interpreted by the genius of fiction. When it has been done by the great seers, we will find answered many questions which puzzle us to-day. Not the mirror but the cosmic microscope must be used as the tool. It will not be done by one man; it will take a literary army—let the advance guard come with our generation!