It is the sum of individual experiences that makes up the influence of a journal like _The Nation_, and one may therefore be pardoned the egotism necessarily arising from a relation of one's own contact with it. In 1866, while a student at the University of Chicago, I remember well that, in a desultory talk in the English Literature class, Professor William Matthews spoke of _The Nation_ and advised the students to read it each week as a political education of high value. This was the first knowledge I had of it, but I was at that time, along with many other young men, devoted to the _Round Table_, an "Independent weekly review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society, and Art," which flourished between the years 1864 and 1868. We asked the professor, "Do you consider _The Nation_ superior to the _Round Table_?"--"Decidedly," was his reply. "The editors of the _Round Table_ seem to write for the sake of writing, while the men who are expressing themselves in _The Nation_ do so because their hearts and minds are full of their matter." This was a just estimate of the difference between the two journals. The _Round Table_, modeled after the _Saturday Review_, was a feeble imitation of the London weekly, then in its palmy days, while _The Nation_, which was patterned after the _Spectator_, did not suffer by the side of its model. On this hint from Professor Matthews, I began taking and reading _The Nation_, and with the exception of one year in Europe during my student days, I have read it ever since.