The Mills of Mammon

Joliet IL: P.H. Murray & Company. Very Good-. 1909. Second Edition. Hardcover. (decorated cloth; no dust jacket) [moderately worn book, bumping/softening at all corners, light external soiling, hinges weak but not split, last page of text is affixed to rear pastedown (no impact on readability)]. (B&W frontispiece illustration) Hanna 468: "A socialist novel. A crusading minister is driven from his pulpit by parishioners deriving income from property used for vice." A contemporary review identifies the author as "a national organizer of the socialist party," and pronounces the book "infinitely ahead of most of the claptrap that has been put out by aspiring socialists in the way of fiction, and which has all too plainly the hands of the unskilled literary workman." Going on to describe some of the plot elements, the same reviewer writes: "We have the work and the cruelty and the murder of the shop presented, the stealing of invention from the inventors, the stealing of girls for the white slave traffic, the hightoned 'respectable' club, the way elections are carried, the way formal charities are conducted, the shallowness of the revival, the disposition of the woman that lives 'illegitimate', the real brutality of extreme 'professing' Christians, the organization of the shop." (This review, by the way, is from the Helena News in Helena, Montana, which seems to have, no surprise, been a socialist paper. It was given a similarly robust notice in another socialist organ, The Oklahoma Pioneer.) Included in Rideout's bibliography, but not discussed in the book itself. .