Others, who met Sun only casually, or who could know him only through his writings, have a quite different impression of his thought. They perforce assume that he thought as he wrote, and fail to realize that virtually all his writings and speeches were occasional pieces, improvisations designed as propaganda. One of the most respected American authorities on China says that in the _San Min Chu I_ “... there is a combination of sound social analysis, keen comment on comparative political science, and bombast, journalistic inaccuracy, jejune philosophizing and sophomoric economics.”(18) This view is one which can scarcely be attacked, if one considers only the printed lectures, and overlooks the other utterances and the personality of Sun. To apply this, or any similar estimate (and there are many of them), to all of Sun Yat-sen’s thought would be woefully inaccurate. It is not the critic’s fault that Sun never found time to write a sober, definitive political treatise expressing his ideas; it is, nevertheless, the critic’s responsibility to weigh the value of the _San Min Chu I_, and consider the importance which Sun himself attached to it, before judging Sun’s whole philosophy by a hastily-composed and poorly written book. Yet, if the Western student of modern Chinese history were to look elsewhere for some general exposition of Sun Yat-sen’s political ideas, he would find none. He could discover several excellent translations of the sixteen lectures, and parts of the other work of Sun. He would be helped by the prefatory notes to some of these translations.(19) A few treatises would be available to him on special phases of Sun’s thought: the influence of Maurice William, and the influence of the Russian Communists.(20) In addition, there would be the biographies, of which there are more than a dozen, and a few other useful although not general works. None of these sifts Sun’s thought, seeking to separate the transitory from the permanent in his ideas. For this the searcher would have to rely on brief outlines of Sun’s ideas, to be found in works dealing with modern China or the Chinese revolution.(21)