The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-11-25

grim tragedy that rags ill conceal, in wreathe of atayistic smiling. The refined and educated cruelty that laughs. as dog barks, at beggar is the social effort of the we'll pos sessed to make little of their de- spelling. And the masses who take their vices and their virtues as they mimic the emotions and the senti- ments of the exploiting classes usu- ally are delighted to hide what sym pathy might be theirs in laugh al Weary Willie and Happy Hooligan. London knew better than that. He had been through the terrific experi- ence of hobodom. He knew what everyone of those lives meant with so many of them the victims of thousand and one social injustices l that made them the pariahs that l later functioned in so ephemeral manner for the jokist of the comic paper, whose spavined humor hobb- led slowly along to meet the popular 1 demand.
 fiI he wrote as he knew ther: he knew the heartache that had passed beyond the stage of tears and the bitter indignation that like cannibal lived upon it's own best and humanest feelings He saw that it is only a matter of time that those who are denied sympathy will lose all sympathetic feelings, and that the fate of one who has every hand turned against him is that he shall turn his hand against everyone in turn, the common fate of Ishmael in every age.
 So when he writes of the miseries of the sea, or the equally monstrous miseries of the workers lives, he knew himself and could write as one possessed of true things to tell. It was his magnificent gift not to observe men in the mass. but man in the individual He knew that the collectively is generally the abstract, and the abstract is poor theme for one who would write truly of human beings.
 There are all kinds of writers to- day. Some of them write entertain ingly enough. But they write about conditions and about life that they never have experienced. Usually, it may be taken for granted that those who will create an environment which they have wrought solely out of their acquired and not through their personal knowledge, will also take the same liberty with the men and women of the story. They will be creatures of imagination solely. They will not be creatures of flesh and blood, with the loves and hopes and fears and daring of real living beings. The difference between a London and the majority of story writers is just that his folk are folk who have lived, and their folk are folk who are dummies and mannl- kins.
 Even the rawest plot by the most impossible writer attains realism in the movies just because they have been brought from the imaginative world to live actually the events con ceived, even though those events are purely artificial. It is a great gift to be able to ransack ones ex- periences and to be able therefrom to pick out some that will interest and fascinate the reader when the tale is again told. That is the gift of the writer of genius and makes him or her so different from the rest of the story-tellers.
 Every one of the stories by Lon- don had such a foundation in fact; he had personally met the Sea Wolf. and Martin Eden was we'll known to him. The most fugitive character in John Barleycorn was one who had impressed his image. fieeting or otherwise, upon tho retina of Lon don's experience, and he recollected that impression.
 His socialist and economic views find counterpart in his literary ac- tivities. There too his experience, hard, bitter. sordid, often unpleasant as an association with the People of the Abyss must necessarily be, have found him realizing that all was due to the system. His logi-