Crime, we might well say, constitutes an integral part of Dreiser’s metaphysics. It occurs as a natural episode in the history of the individual man asserting his will against society. The truth of the aphorism that “might is right” cannot be proved without it. Crime and the repressions which accompany it are the fatal results of the revolt of temperament against its environment. After what we know of Dreiser’s bio-chemical convictions, we may easily foresee that his philosophy of crime and the criminal will give no part to responsibility. The criminal, like the buccaneer of finance, of the “genius,” will be a machine set in motion by blind and irresistible laws. Dreiser’s determinism eliminates free will and along with it the criminal himself. For this reason we must not expect the pathetic appeals to conscience from him which are found in Victor Hugo, Dostoievski and Tolstoi. Crime, according to Dreiser, has nothing to do with conscience, since conscience does not exist, but it may have something to do with science. In his ethical system there is no room for pity, expiation and remorse. The days of “The Scarlet Letter” are gone. In the light of bio-chemistry a criminal has no more or less importance than a rattlesnake, a shark or the microbe of cancer. This determinism in regard to crime was arraigned forty years ago in M. Paul Bourget’s “The Disciple,” and it was cynically illustrated by Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s “Le rouge et le noir.” Clyde Griffiths, like Robert Greslou in “The Disciple,” has placed himself beyond evil and good. Let us hear from Theodore Dreiser himself the story of Clyde Griffiths. It will save many readers the trouble of plodding tediously along in the morass of the most instructive and also the most monotonous book ever written by the novelist. Clyde Griffiths is the son of more or less abnormal parents. His father and mother are religious fanatics. Clyde is ambitious and dreams of a bright future. He begins as a bell boy of a hotel in Kansas City. An uncle of his, a wealthy manufacturer, gives him a start. He falls in love with the girl Roberta. He has a bio-chemical idyll with her. Just at the moment that she becomes pregnant he finds a new and more promising affinity in the person of a rich heiress. The world is his if he marries her. But there is Roberta and her trouble. What will Griffiths do with her? He deliberately plans to get rid of her. He takes her to a pond and drowns her. He is caught, tried, convicted and sent to the electric chair. _The Inevitable Equation_ acts as mathematically and objectively in his case as a guillotine. Bio-chemical predestination leaves no hope from the start. The presentation of the case, the climax, the anticlimax, and the _dénouement_ follow each other as the conclusions of a theorem. Nothing is left to chance, providence or imagination. Griffiths acts thus and thus, he wants this and this, and he gets what he deserves.