This attempt to differentiate the novelist’s approach from the scientist’s is not meant to prove that the novelist’s is better. It is simply different, representing another aspect of the difference between science and art. Each discipline tries to describe and interpret experience. Where one does it by means of well-defined, rigidly controlled techniques within generally accepted boundaries, the other is highly flexible, embodying a view of life shaped by an individual set of preferences and dislikes, talents and blind spots. Each of these divergent methods offers advantages and disadvantages. One should not go to political novels expecting to find, except in rare cases, complete objectivity, solidly documented references, and exhaustive expositions of political theory. He should not always anticipate credibility. When problems are presented, the reader may not find answers or even indications of the directions in which they may be found. But one cannot go to a scientific monograph with the hope of meeting in its pages someone whose life is an embodiment of a problem, or whose survival represents the gaining of a goal, his death the losing of it. These two approaches to the study of politics complement each other, just as the physician and clergyman both mean to keep their identical patient and parishioner well and whole. The novelist can, however, enter well into the scientist’s field. When he deals with actual events, he tries to record them as they happened. If the names and places are changed, he is usually faithful to the manner or meaning of the events. In _Bricks Without Straw_ Albion W. Tourgée assures the reader that these events or others exactly like them took place during the Reconstruction era in the South, and there is no reason to doubt him. Sinclair’s _Oil!_ exhaustively treats the Sacco-Vanzetti case; it is completely opinionated, but it is a historical account, nonetheless, of one of the most memorable political cases in American history. More than a historian, the political novelist is also an analyst. He sees cause-effect relationships at work, he looks into stimulus and response, motivation and satisfaction. Stendhal is not content merely to describe military and political events during the Napoleonic era; he goes beneath the surface to explain what some of them meant. =The Purposes of This Study=