might solve this problem, might learn to co-operate in their housekeeping, and save a part of their time for study and play. Here were the newspaper-editors of New York City, who were supposed to report the experiment, and who behaved like a band of Brazilian Indians, hiding in the woods about Helicon Hall and shooting the inmates full of poisoned arrows. Upton Sinclair and his little group of co-workers became a public spectacle, a free farce-comedy for the great Metropolis of Mammon. The cynical newspaper editors, whose first maxim in life is that nothing can ever be changed, picked out their cleverest young wits and sent them to spy in our nursery, and eavesdrop in our pantry, and report all the absurdities they could see or hear or invent.
The procedure was so dishonest that even the reporters themselves sickened of it. There was one young man who used to come every Sunday, to write us up in Monday's "New York Sun"; for, you see, on Mondays there is generally a scarcity of news, and we served as comic relief to the sermons of the Fifth Avenue clergy. The "Sun," of course, treated us according to its tradition—as in the old days it had treated "Sorosis" and the "Populists." "Mr. Sinclair," said this young reporter, "you've got an awfully interesting place here, and I like the people, and feel like a cur to have to write as I do; but you know what the 'Sun' is." I answered that I knew. "Well," said the reporter, "can't you think of something amusing that I can write about, that won't do any harm?" So I thought. I had brought a collie dog from my farm at Princeton, and three times this dog had strayed or been stolen. "You might write about the dog instead of about the people," I said. So next morning there were two or three columns in the "New York Sun," making merry over this latest evidence of the failure of co-operative housekeeping! Upton Sinclair's dog refused to stay at Helicon Hall!
And then there was the famous adventure with Sadakichi Hartmann. One day there arrived a post-card, reading: "Sadakichi Hartmann will call." The announcement had a sort of royal sound, and I made inquiry and ascertained that I ought to have known who Sadakichi Hartmann was. Just about dinner-time there appeared two men and a girl, all three clad in soiled sweaters. One of the men was the Japanese-German art-critic, and the other was Jo Davidson,
