Dreiser will never forget the tub where the lobster got the best of the squid, despite its camouflage. There at last you had a true lesson in behaviorism and on the art of _stimuli_ and responses, an ethics construed out of automatic actions. Henceforth human beings in Dreiser’s books will be easily divided into two classes, those which eat and those which are eaten, the lobsters and the squids. Crude and elementary as this classification may well seem, it is based upon an honest attempt to study life at close quarters. * * * * * Such an unsophisticated view of this world did not inspire the novelist with much indulgence in dealing with his own country. Darwinism made him rather harsh with democratic institutions. He is too fond of the trivial and the commonplace not to cherish the United States. “A Hoosier Holiday” is a faithful and, on the whole, an eulogious and sometimes lyrical survey of America. This masterpiece of indifference to the laws of literary perspective is, taken altogether, the most suggestive collection of _Reisebilder_. Here is the American Middle West photographed from life, an easy-going, happy-go-lucky country, half modern, half patriarchal with his cornucopias teeming with corn and cattle, half savage, half civilized, half awake, half vegetative, more remote from Europe than the cannibals in Typee’s island. Dreiser, the satirist, the philosopher and the artist, keeps a harmonious copy all through the book for our delight. “A Hoosier Holiday” is a pleasant medley of sketches, cartoons, soliloquies and lyrical outbursts. It is the best book which Dreiser has written. It is apparent that America is very dear to the heart of Theodore Dreiser, although he does not spare her his criticisms. He loves her, pets her and scolds her, as he would a child: Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And the great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them all, and their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run under the sun! Here they are building a viaduct, there a great road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel, religiously mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains or thinking that much praying will carry them to heaven--the dear things!--and then among them are the bad men, the loafers, the people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities Saturday nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money! Dear, dear, darling Yankee land--“my country ’tis”--when I think of you and all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and your faith--I could cry over you, wringing my hands.[22] And yet he prefers America to Europe: