It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches goodness should be found in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ As in his other novels, the industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross is an exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries to see his workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in acquisition of oil lands by varied methods rather than iron-handed labor relations. After his death it is discovered that his business has deteriorated and his assets have melted, partly because of the naval oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing bundle of one million dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his closest associate and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few unsuppressed humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in this particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able to bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing a leftist paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s Cagoulards in _Presidential Agent_ are quite willing to weaken France in order to retain the Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are blood brothers of Malraux’s Ferral, who does not see the consequences of his economic interpretation of current history. The aristocrats and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell family in _Boston_. Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and liquidate a parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory. Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists who treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than Disraeli’s. When one compares the literary treatment of the lower classes with that of the upper, the difference is striking. One might explain this superficially on the grounds of distortion for dramatic emphasis, or the use of ready-made heroes and villains. But whatever the reasons, the majority of political novelists have been impelled to sympathize with the lower classes and condemn the upper. POLITICAL GROUPS