t the candlestick-maker, at
least the stenographer and the department store clerk--as well as the
doctor, lawyer, merchant, and chief. What is true of the Sunday
newspaper is true of the popular magazine.

The most successful publisher in this country attributes the success of
his periodical to the fact that he kept before his mind's eye, as a
type, a family of his acquaintance in a Middle-Western town of fifteen
hundred inhabitants, and shaped the policy of his publication to meet
the needs and interests of all its members. An editor who desired to
reach such a family would be immeasurably helped in selecting his
material by trying constantly to judge from their point of view whatever
passed through his hands. It is equally true that a writer desiring to
gain admittance to that magazine, or to others making the same appeal,
would greatly profit by visualizing as vividly as possible a similar
family. Every successful writer, consciously or unconsciously, thus
pictures his readers to himself.

If, for example, an author is preparing an article for an agricultural
journal, he must have in his mind's eye an average farmer and this
farmer's family. Not only must he see them in their surroundings; he
must try to see life from their point of view. The attitude of the
typical city man toward the farm and country life is very different from
that of the countryman. Lack of sympathy and insight is a fatal defect
in many an article intended by the writer for farm readers.

Whatever the publication to which an author desires to contribute, he
should consider first, last, and all the time, its readers--their
surroundings, their education, their income, their ambitions, their
amusements, their prejudices--in short, he must see them as they really
are.

The necessity of understanding the reader and his point of view has been
well brought out by Mr. John M. Siddall, editor of the _American
Magazine_, in the following excerpt from an editorial in that
periodical:

The man who refuses to use his imagination to enable him to look at
things from the other fellow's point of view simply cannot exercise
wide influence. He cannot reach people.

Underneath it, somehow, lies a great law, the law of service. You
can't expect to attract people unless you do something for them. The
business man who has something to sell must have something useful to
sell, and he must talk about it from the point of view of the peo