W H HILE STEFFENS IS, no doubt, still remembered by the older generation as one of the most distinguished journalists of his time, and while admirable work has been done on his contribution to the history of the period,' he can scarcely be said to have received his due meed of recognition as a serious student and theorist of politics. While Steffens was admittedly a journalist first and foremost, and an active campaigner who always preferred to study the contemporary conflict from a grandstand seat, it is also true that he was no mere ephemeral pamphleteer. It is, in some ways, a pity that his name is linked by an almost automatic association of ideas with muckraking, a movement he claimed, with more pride than historical exactitude, to have originated. At the time of his association with McClure's at the beginning of the century, he appeared to have established almost a vested interest in corruption; but with the broadening of his political experience under the impact of world war and revolution his views were to develop far beyond his earlier speculations, as any reader of the Autobiography and his voluminous correspondence may judge. His muckraking experiences stamped him indelibly as a radical and to this tradition he always remained loyal; but they also lent to a naturally impish flair in his humor, an irreverence which sometimes shocked gratuitously and served to establish him as an irresponsible enfant terrible to the respectable. When asked by President Eliot of Harvard whether his proposal to lecture to the undergraduates on social corruption was designed to teach them to avoid such pitfalls, Steffens at once repudiated the idea. I don't mean to keep the boys from succeeding in their professions, 2 was his reply; and that, as he tersely puts it, ended him with Mr. Eliot. The episode is noteworthy for its suggestion of Steffens' method. It was his ambition to uphold the Machiavellian tradition in politics, to confine himself to a wholly unemotional, tough-minded analysis of the facts as he found them. And however one-sided the picture he presented may be, it was not one which could have been formulated by anyone other than a man of unusual courage, integrity, and candor. What makes Steffens' work so refreshing, in contrast to the more stereotyped approach of the academic political scientist, is the slow emergence of his tentative theories out of the crude experiences culled in the newspaper office, the police court, the east side slum, the hustings, the