m not going to make the new magazine my own megaphone--you may be
sure of that. It will nevertheless contain my general
interpretation of things, in which I swear I do believe! The first
thing, of course, is to establish it. Then it can be shaped more
nearly into what I wish it to become. If it seem unmannerly,
aggressive, I know no other way to make it heard. If it died, then
the game would be up. Well, we seem to have established it at once.
It promises not to cost us a penny of investment.

Now, the magazines need new topics. They have all threshed over old
straw for many years. There is _one_ new subject, to my thinking
worth all the old ones: the new impulse in American life, the new
feeling of nationality, our coming to realize ourselves. To my mind
there is greater promise in democracy than men of any preceding
period ever dared dream of--aggressive democracy--growth by action.
Our writers (the few we have) are yet in the pre-democratic era.
When men's imaginations lay hold on the things that already begin
to appear above the horizon, we shall have something worth reading.
At present I can do no more than bawl out, "See! here are new
subjects." One of these days somebody will come along who can write
about them. I have started out without a writer. Fiske is under
contract, James would give nothing more to the _Atlantic_, you were
ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate
essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers. Beyond
these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a
dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women. I can
(soon) get all that I could ever have got in the _Atlantic_ and new
ones (I know they'll come) whom I could never have got there.

You'll see--within a year or two--by far a better magazine than I
have ever made; and you and I will differ in nothing unless you
feel despair about the breakdown of certain democratic theories,
which I think were always mere theories. Let 'em go! The real
thing, which is life and action, is better.

Heartily and always your grateful friend,
Walter H. Page

Thus the fact that Page's new magazine was intended for a popular
audience was not the result of accident, but of design. It represented a
periodical plan whic