It is, however, the other side of the matter that is important. Our best magazines are vital: they are enlisting the services of every kind of thinker and teacher and man of experience, and they are printing as good fiction and verse as they can get; certainly they are not willfully printing inferior work. But it is not the fiction or the verse in the magazines that is of greatest moment, even when it is good. The value of the magazine lies in the miscellaneous contributions on science, politics, medicine, and current affairs, which seem to me of continuously good substance from month to month. And the literary quality of these articles (the words I quoted from Professor James are from a fine article printed in a popular magazine, _McClure’s_) is, on the whole, just as high as the average in the old _Edinburgh Review_, through which Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, and others, with stinging and brilliant essays, helped to reform that terribly brutal England of the early nineteenth century. It is easy to find fault with the magazines. You may say that the _Atlantic Monthly_ is pseudo-literary and seems to be living on the sweepings of a New England culture of which all the important representatives died twenty years ago. You may say that the _Nation_ often sounds as if it were written by the more narrow-minded sort of college professor. You may say that the _Outlook_ is permeated by a weak religiosity. All the same, if you see on a man’s table the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Nation_, and the _Outlook_, and the copies look as if they had been read, you may be reasonably sure that that man appreciates good writing and has a just-minded view of public questions. Of the lighter, more “entertaining” magazines there are, from an ideal point of view, too many, and the large circulation of some of the sillier ones indicates what we all know and need not moralize about--that there are millions of uneducated people who want something to read. It is, however, a matter for congratulation that some of the best magazines, _McClure’s_, _Collier’s_, _The Youth’s Companion, Everybody’s_, have large circulations, and that our respectable and well-bred old friends, _Scribner’s_, _Harper’s_, the _Century_, are national institutions.[8] It is difficult to understand how the American magazine and the American newspaper are products of the same nation; the magazine is so honest and so able, the newspaper so dishonest and so ignorant except in its genius for making money and sending chills up the back. We will not waste our time by turning the rest of this chapter into an article demanding a “reform” of the newspapers, but in the spirit of a conscientious guide of young readers we will make two or three observations.