fellow-worker for humanity.

G.A.




AN INTRODUCTORY WORD ABOUT THE BOOK.

BY W.T. STEAD.


James Runciman was a remarkably gifted man who died just about the
time when he ought to have been getting into harness for his life's
work. He had in him, more than most men, the materials out of which
an English Zola might have been made. And as we badly need an English
Zola, and have very few men out of whom such a genius could be
fashioned, I have not ceased to regret the death of the author of
this volume. For Zola is the supreme type in our day of the
novelist-journalist, the man who begins by getting up his facts at
first-hand with the care and the exhaustiveness of a first-rate
journalist, and who then works them up with the dramatic and literary
skill of a great novelist. Charles Reade was something of the kind in
his day; but he has left no successor.

James Runciman might have been such an one, if he had lived. He had
the tireless industry, the iron constitution, the journalist's keen
eye for facts, the novelist's inexhaustible fund of human sympathy. He
was a literary artist who could use his pen as a brush with brilliant
effect, and he had an amazing facility in turning out "copy." He had