How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in
the contrast between _Manassas_ and _100%_; the two books illustrate the
range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a
generation. _Manassas_ is the work of a man filled with epic memories
and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic
principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw
splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite
of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American
picture Mr. Sinclair in _Jimmie Higgins_, the story of a socialist who
went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse,
settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the
colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature that suggests
both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire
volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to
patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution
opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the
war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of
Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the
sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr.
Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great
a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does
not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment,
beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill
and dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest
Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the
accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great
war.

The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and
documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages