But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.'s have no patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so pronounced he says: The area of the country is too great and the means of communication between the workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for effective political action in mass. In the worst event--and it is only in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable--the newspapers, magazines, telephones, and telegraphs, all the apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the materials of warfare, will be in the hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious, united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high. It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself could tell tales. Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells's important opinions. The book isn't really a whole: some of the essays are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable--horrible admission--but he is still prophetic. In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand's workshop the book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text for salvation of the world. WILLIAM L. CHENERY. A Novelist's Review of a Novel Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.] "I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now."--FRANK NORRIS.