The Taskmasters

"The Taskmasters," by Mr. George Kibbe Turner, is the first volume of the "First Novel Series" that has been projected by a leading firm of publishers. We may say at once that the series will be in no danger of failure if it can be maintained upon the level of this novel. The theme is found in the political and business life of a New England factory town, and, although well worn in its main outlines, this theme is here set forth with a degree of judgment and literary skill that has not often been equaled. It is a book of honest and manly ideals presented without exaggeration or the appeal of false sentiment. On the political side, it exhibits the corrupting influence of a great employer of labor upon the community which he dominates by his wealth, and exposes the hypocrisies of the protective system. But at the same time it presents the case of the employer with fairness, and does not gloss over the faults of the employed. In the unending struggle for the amelioration of social conditions, the author sees no profit in radical measures, and is too clear-sighted to denounce the selfishness of capitalism as the sole cause of the present unsatisfactory relations. His outlook is expressed in a fine passage which comes near the close of the book, and which we wish to reproduce. "A new sound has come into the land these last few years -- the voice of the little a priori thinker, with his tinsel, ready-made universe, formed in a night from the discarded timber of a hundred familiar systems of the working philosophers of a century; the cry of the bearded apostle of the future, a strange new hybrid of a prophet and a walking delegate; an inventor of another new Utopia, wailing in the market place because mankind refuses all at once to step aboard his new flying machine, and be whisked away across the yawning precipices of the unknown to regions of ineffable bliss. All these things have their places in the great economy of nature, no doubt, -- a bare-headed socialist calling beneath the electric light across the half deserted street; a religious sentimentalist haranguing his weekly parcel of old maids in the resounding vestry of a church; a pismire shouting from his blade of grass for a fixed star to change its course. Meanwhile society moves on in its great orbit. Compromise succeeds compromise, one little gain another -- new conditions, new privileges, new generations, better, more intelligent than the old; new inventions, changing the whole face of continents; society working out its vast experiments-in the great cities, in these hundred towns and villages of ours -- the tremendous laboratories of the experience of mankind, forming slowly, painfully, but magnificently, the new order of things under our very eyes." It is welcome to find a book, dealing with the social problem in this spirit, that is permeated by as sound a social philosophy. Considered simply as a story, the book is well-planned and deeply interesting. Its studies of the baser types that figure in local politics are convincingly realized; the figures of hero and heroine are truthfully drawn, and the grim climax of the plot, with the tragic death of the magnate in the very hour of his political triumph, is managed with a degree of skill that promises much for the future of this young writer. He tells his story directly, with nervous animation, and without resort to the weakly sentiment in which most young writers upon these themes take refuge. The book is a strong and wholesome performance, and deserves to be widely read. --The Dial, Vol. 34