hort shrift. Mr. Snooks is
seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively
financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might
have drifted into pork or theatres--from purely financial reasons. His
literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the
south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much
foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just
a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall
blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls
the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting
his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition
to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of
kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the
second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the
aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't
understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too
"literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of
actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better
than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are
not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer
darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number
_Snooks's Monthly_ has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck
of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by
the euphonious names of their proprietors.

Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his
own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors
should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the
modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was
aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors
the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past
knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were
interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling.
Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in
objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial.
Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of
literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary