Then, of a sudden, Siss! Boom! Ah! Then, overnight, the upspringing of the intellectual soviets, the headlong assault upon all the old axioms of pedagogical speculation, the nihilistic dethronement of Prof. Dewey—and rah, rah, rah for Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen! Veblen? Could it be—? Aye, it was! My old acquaintance! The _Doctor obscurus_ of my half-forgotten bout with the so-called intellectual Socialist! The Great Thinker _redivivus_! Here, indeed, he was again, and in a few months—almost it seemed a few days—he was all over the _Nation_, the _Dial_, the _New Republic_ and the rest of them, and his books and pamphlets began to pour from the presses, and the newspapers reported his every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began gabbling about him. The spectacle, I do not hesitate to say, somewhat disconcerted me and even distressed me. On the one hand, I was sorry to see so learned and interesting a man as Dr. Dewey sent back to the insufferable dungeons of Columbia, there to lecture in imperfect Yiddish to classes of Grand Street Platos. And on the other hand, I shrunk supinely from the appalling job, newly rearing itself before me, of re-reading the whole canon of the singularly laborious and muggy, the incomparably tangled and unintelligible works of Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen.... But if a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies, and so I managed to get through the whole infernal job. I read “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” I read “The Theory of Business Enterprise,” and then I read “The Instinct of Workmanship.” An hiatus followed; I was racked by a severe neuralgia, with delusions of persecution. On recovering I tackled “Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.” Malaria for a month, and then “The Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation.” What ensued was never diagnosed; probably it was some low infection of the mesentery or spleen. When it passed off, leaving only an asthmatic cough, I read “The Higher Learning in America,” and then went to Mt. Clemens to drink the Glauber’s salts. Eureka! the business was done! It had strained me, but now it was over. Alas, a good part of the agony had been needless. What I found myself aware of, coming to the end, was that practically the whole system of Prof. Dr. Veblen was in his first book and his last—that is, in “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” and “The Higher Learning in America.” I pass on the good news. Read these two, and you won’t have to read the others. And if even two daunt you, then read the first. Once through it, though you will have missed many a pearl and many a pain, you will have a fairly good general acquaintance with the gifted metaphysician’s ideas.