Because it violates the self-preservative instinct no story of suicide can have a wide human audience unless, in the words of Dick at the close of Masefield’s _Lost Endeavour_, we are filled with the feeling that “life goes on.” The act of destruction must be, however blindly, an act of immolation on the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we get in reading Jack London’s largely autobiographical _Martin Eden_; and, in a much more striking instance, the terrible act that closed the life of the heroine in Tolstoy’s _Anna Karenina_ falls well before the end of the book. In _Anna Karenina_, as in _War and Peace_, the Russian novelist conveys to every reader an invincible conviction of the unbreakable continuity of the life of the race. The last words of _Anna Karenina_ are not those which describe Anna’s death under the car wheels but the infinitely hopeful words of Levin: “I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach-man, and get into useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why. But my whole life, every moment of my life, independently of whatever may happen to me, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning which I shall have the power to impress upon it.” 9 It is because they appeal so strongly and simply and directly to our instinctive desires that the stories of Jack London are so popular; it is their perfect appeal to our social instinct that makes the tales of O. Henry sell thousands of copies month after month. Not even Dickens transcended O. Henry in the perfection of this appeal; and O. Henry set the right value on Dickens as at least one of his stories shows. Civilization and education refine man’s instinctive desires, modify the paths they take, but do not weaken them perceptibly from generation to generation except in a few individual cases. Read the second chapter of Harold Bell Wright’s _The Shepherd of the Hills_ and observe the tremendous call to the instinct of race perpetuation, prefaced by a character’s comment on the careless breeding of man as contrasted with man’s careful breeding of animals. And if you think the appeal is crude, be very sure of this: The crudity is in yourself, in the instinct that you are not accustomed to have set vibrating with such healthy vigor. 10 All this deals with broadest fundamentals. But they are what the publisher, judging his manuscript, must fathom. They are deeper down than the sales manager need go, or the bookseller; deeper than the critic need ordinarily descend in his examination into the book’s qualities.