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Show THE MONTHLY MAGAZINES. Some of them are still good, a very few. But the most of them, how shall they be described? There is no way except to compare them with, say the Atlantic Monthly, When such writers as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Lowell, Willis, Julia Ward Howe, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier and others that might be named were contributors. Now fifteen pages of ads to the front of them, fifty pages of ads to the back of them, everything included from soap to automobiles. And between these ads, the reading read-ing matter. Ten to one that will be something strenuous about the very rich, and so poorly disguised dis-guised that we know the rich man paid for it, and we could estimate the amount by the character and quantity of the gush, if we only knew what the unit was from which the publisher, as a basis, figured. We can see plainly enough, too, that the photographs of character have all been doctored; every wrinkle has been smoothed out, every harsh angle has been polished down. So far as the magazines go it will be easy for Russell Sage to be handed down as an inborn philanthropist philan-thropist and Mr. Lawson as the entirely disinterested disin-terested friend of the poor. The editor's part is reduced to a page, and as a rule the magazine would be just as valuable and more interesting if that page should be omitted. Around it all is the odor of the counting-room. We read one page and reflect instinctively that it is the page that paid for the oil in the engine room, or for the metal for the stereotype plates. The next page goes to settle with the men who run the linotype machines; the next is for the press and bindery people, and the next for the writers who supply the filling between the paid-for articles. The illustrations illus-trations are sometimes fine for publishers know that white men are like Indians, they love picture lessons for they please the eye and it does not require any effort of the brain to take them in. But by the above we are casting no reproach upon publishers, for as business men they are bound to furnish such goods as will sell. In a frontier town, where Indians and squaws are the chief purchasers, a red blanket weighing three pounds and made out of half wool and half cotton, will bring more than a thoroughly shrunken gray blanket made from the finest wool and weighing eight pounds. Then again, there are multitudes of readers who take in all the advertisements in the front and back of magazines before they aproach the reading read-ing matter. And to tell the truth some of the advertisements ad-vertisements are better reading than the labored articles in the body of the magazine. All this shows that a majority of the American people are so much absorbed with the struggle to make money that when a leisure hour comes they do not want to be obliged to think they simply want to be amused'. We can see this in the theatres. A vaudeville show will draw, the crowd from the stateliest drama or sublimest opera ever written, though performed by a perfect per-fect company. Not for a night, perhaps, but for a week, yes. We do not say that the manhood and womanhood of the land is deteriorating, but it is clear that the great absorbing pursuit for more money is pushing the gentler, deeper, more exalted ex-alted attributes of the race aside for the present, and this pursuit is accompanied with such care and with so many known and unknown tragedies, that when men turn from it for an hour, they do not want to think, but only to be amused. The universities have been forced to change their courses of study. The average student says in effect: "Give me a course that will set me going in a chosen career, give me that and' a diploma as a letter of credit and then let me out." There will come a calm after a while. Such an one as came to the old world when the new world's surface treasures were first skimmed and the nations for a time were weary of war; when in England and France and Germany there rose . j up a company of intellectual giants. But not yet. '( The stock market has .nore charms than the classics, and the prices of copper and of steel and railroad shares give direction to society. |
