Anderson’s imagination is pessimistic. He sees the world in black and white. He is quite veracious in saying that there is something Russian in him. His artistic sense and his philanthropic Christian heart connive to comprehend the most pathetic aspects of life with sympathy. He has cast his lot with the proletarian, the poor, the desperate, the lonely, in the sooty suburbs of the big cities or the twilight of some village. He is pessimistic, but his pessimism is religious and moral. Man does not live by bread alone but by whatever word issues from the mouth of God. Anderson is a disciple of Tolstoi. The social problem, as he conceives it, is a moral problem. Social anarchy is but a sign of the chaos within us. We may, through true insight, arrive at the source of our troubles: In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavors, is the riddle of the Universe; and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form, and for which he also will laugh in the face of death, is in all men. By grasping that fact, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods that walk, and not a man of all the thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea, but lived the rest of his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer, sleeping in his soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of brotherhood from a soapbox. The long march, the burning of the throat and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned, instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land, by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men. Anderson is not dazzled by the sumptuous façade of American prosperity. He sees the reverse of the stage setting, the slums, the mines, the factories, the jails and the asylums. Listen to Beaut McGregor, the hero of “Marching Men,” as he stands on the hills above the dark valleys where the sordid cottages of the miners are nested: