But it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become, the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals. When a nation declares for war, it declares for a war to be waged by its professionals, and it turns them on to do a job which, according to civilised practices, is a dirty job. And when it is fired with patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its emotions on something it cannot understand or realise, for the simple reason that the violence of war is strange, distantly horrible, fascinating, but unfamiliar. It has never directly entered into our experience. V SPECIALISM IN LITERATURE Some time ago Mr. Brander Matthews made the original suggestion in the _North American Review_ that books should be written for the benefit of the reader. The suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical, but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not bowing down before the sacrosanctity of the "serious" author. He admits that "a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the author's personality;" primarily it ought to express him; but secondarily--and this is Mr. Brander Matthews' point--"it is for the sole benefit of the reader." I think we may go a little further than Mr. Matthews, and find a second reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general reader. In the case which Mr. Matthews seemed to be considering there are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they cannot write. Secondly, there are authors who, in the ordinary literary sense of the term, can write, who have gathered knowledge and formed seriously-grounded opinions about life, who are nevertheless so out of touch with the broad, common interests of men that they invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal. Every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it. In a crude, energetic, excessively eulogised novel published in America a few years ago--_Queed_--we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in America capable of understanding it. There is, doubtless, something to be said for an appreciative audience of three; but it is safe to assert that even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible. I am, however, thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to rank as literary studies. It is through literature that the historian, the biographer, the sociologist, and the philosopher must make their contributions to knowledge. Yet how much research and how much acute thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making his subject alive for others, has not the reconstructive imagination by means of which truth is communicated! It is because he cannot write.