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Page 73
The foregoing paragraph was written with little thought of what was coming
to be added to it. You and we have something to be proud of. Our REVIEW
has been doing its part in saving all Europe from the waste of hundreds of
millions of money, and the literatures of all Europe from a degradation
like that through which our own is passing. Read the following letter:
Dear Mr. [Editor]:
I have already sent a line through ---- thanking you for the copy
of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, which you were good enough to send me,
but I should like to repeat my thanks to you again direct, and at
the same time, tell you how the REVIEW has been of service to
European publishers.
The article in the last number entitled _Our Government Subvention
to Literature_ naturally interested me very much from a personal
point of view, but the statistics you give showing the effect of
second class matter rate on book sales was very valuable to me as
the representative of the English Publishers on the Executive
Committee of the International Publishers Congress.
At the Congress held at Budapest last June, a resolution was
adopted instructing the Congress to press for a reduced rate of
postage on periodicals, and an international stamp. The steps to
be taken in order to carry out this resolution were discussed at
the meeting of the Committee last week held at Leipzig, when I
produced the copy of your article, and gave the Committee a
summary of the statistics. The result was the unanimous decision
to take no further steps in the matter.
I tremble to think of what might have happened if I had not had
your article before me, for the point of view which you have put
forward was one that had not occurred to anyone else connected
with the Congress, and if the resolution had not been cut out at
this last meeting of the Executive Committee, it would have gone
before the Postal Conference which is to be held in Madrid this
autumn, backed by practically every European country.
I feel we all owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing out the
facts so clearly, and believe that you will like to know what has
taken place.
While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and
ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly
to accept the lion's share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W. Burrows of
Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression
of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of
the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing
energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that
the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon
the country.
Demos is a good fellow--when he behaves himself, and that generally means
when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to
say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the
scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal
aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.
* * * * *
Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it
permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from
another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation
of a friend, writes:
"I am told it is the best gentleman's magazine in the United
States."
Now, somehow, "gentleman" is a word that we are very chary of using. We
couldn't put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no
inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it--and that
we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that it was
just what we were after--that it includes, or ought to include, about
everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation, it is
certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.
* * * * *
Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the
_Casserole_ of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we
were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous
contentment with existing conditions. This inference was probably drawn
from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man's fortune depends
more upon himself than upon his conditions.
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