Take another illustration--Mr. Winston Churchill. One of the ablest living American novelists, he has gone so wrong that it cannot honestly be supposed he will ever go right again. His earlier novels were not only delightful but actually important. His later novels are intolerable. In such a novel as _The Inside of the Cup_ Mr. Churchill is not writing with the honorable and matter-of-course object of selling a large number of copies and getting an income from them; he is writing with the dishonorable and unavowed object of setting certain ideas before you, the contemplation of which will, in his opinion, do you good. He wants you to think about the horror of a clergyman in leading strings to his wealthiest parishioner. As a fact, there is no horror in such a situation and Mr. Churchill cannot conjure up any. There is no horror, there are only two fools. Now if a man is a fool, he’s a fool; he cannot become anything else, least of all a sensible man. A clergyman in thrall to a rich individual of his congregation is a fool; and to picture him as painfully emancipating himself and becoming not only sensible but, as it were, heroic is to ask us to accept a contradiction in terms. For a fool is not a man who lacks sense, but a man who cannot acquire sense. Not even a miracle can make him sensible; if it could there would be no trouble with _The Inside of the Cup_, for a miracle, being, as G. K. Chesterton says, merely an exceptional occurrence, will always be acquiesced in by the intelligent reader. 4 It would be possible to continue at great length giving examples of authors who have gone wrong and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If we are to accomplish any good end we must try to find out why they have allowed themselves to be deceived or betrayed and what can be done in the shape of rescue work or preventive effort in the future. Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide others aright. After a consideration of cases--we shall not clog the discussion with statistics and shall confine ourselves to general results--we have been led by all the evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. Indeed, in the majority of cases the readers are the great and unyielding force making for sanity and virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral pressure exerted by their readers many, many more authors would certainly stray from the path of business rectitude--not literary rectitude, for there is no such thing. What is humanly right is right in letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in the world.