Psmith, Journalist is history; and it is crusade. But it also has its place as the best novel Wodehouse had written to date. Psmith was the god from the machine; but he was also the god who made the machine. Instead of leaving a good idea to rot in the background of the failure which The Prince and Betty in the American edition is (and there is even less to be said for it in the English one), Wodehouse had hacked his material into shape, introduced his god to bring it to life, and maintained a splendid pace alternating excitement and humour. He had simultaneously been working on another social document, appropriately named Something Fresh, analysing the almost Byzantine absurdities of English country-house drones and the snobbery of their servants which helped to maintain them. It it important to stress that this, the first view of Blandings Castle, is in fact an extremely hostile one. We must view Wodehouse as the disciple of Conan Doyle in social attitudes to some degree; and just as Holmes is frequently employed to show up the effete aristocrats and immoral millionaires, Wodehouse time and again returns to the theme of resolute and hardworking young men and women as a foil to aristocratic drones. In both cases, it is the bourgeois attack on the privilege and non-productivity of the aristocracy. In this sense Wodehouse, both in relation to Britain and to America, was in 1915 very much a figure of that eminently bourgeois phenomenon which the Americans have termed Progressivism. Wodehouse was seldom quite so pointedly hard-hitting as he was in Something Fresh. But the argument continues to be made, pleasantly, yet firmly.