This is not meant to be a controversial novel. I by no means agree with all Barnabas Thorpe's opinions. Nevertheless I believe that the men who fight for their ideals have been, and always will be, the saving element in a world which happily has never yet been left without them.

Before and since the days when Socrates found that it was "impossible to live a quiet life, for that would be to disobey the deity," there have always been some souls who have counted it worth while to lose all else, if haply in the losing they might get nearer to the light from which they came. Their failures, their apparently hopeless mistakes, are often evident enough, yet the mistakes die, and the spirit which animates them lives. It would be dark, indeed, if the torches of those eager runners were to go out.

F. F. M.