Thus wrote ~The Century’s~ first editor, Dr. J. G. Holland, in the first number of this magazine nearly forty-three years ago. He referred, of course, to the magazine’s original title, which was “Scribner’s Monthly”; but ~The Century’s~ earnest ambition to realize the full meaning of its present significant title can find no fitter expression. It continues to believe that success will be attained only as it becomes really the representative magazine of this new and spectacular century of American life. For the information of many inquiring friends, it seems wise at this time to say that there will be no “new” ~Century~ in the sense of a changed ~Century~. There can be none. In remaining the “old” ~Century~, merely growing with the times, merely holding fast to its historic place in the front of progress, this magazine, in these richer days of hard thinking and prompt acting and strenuous living, these tumultuous days of changing eras, remains by mere definition the organ of what is noblest and forwardest in American life. The first editor of this magazine stated editorially that it was conducted in “the free spirit of modern progress and the broadest literary catholicity.” The fourth editor joyfully reaffirms this creed. There can be no simpler and more comprehensive statement of this magazine’s present spirit and purposes. In the twentieth-anniversary number, Richard Watson Gilder, who, on Dr. Holland’s death in 1881, succeeded to the editorship, reaffirmed the creed in these words: If there is any one dominant sentiment which an unprejudiced reviewer would recognize as pervading these forty half-yearly volumes, it is, we think, a sane and earnest Americanism. Along with and part of the American spirit has been the earnest endeavor to do all that such a publication might do to increase the sentiment of union throughout our diverse sisterhood of States--the sentiment of American nationality. It has always been the aim of ~The Century~ not only to be a force in literature and art, but to take a wholesome part in the discussion of great questions; not only to promote good literature and art, but good citizenship. Allowing for different conditions, Mr. Gilder might have written this for to-day. In the same editorial utterance Mr. Gilder dwelt strongly upon “the spirit of experiment” which, he said, had always inspired the magazine’s policy. This we take to be merely another phrase for Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress.” Five years later, on the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary, Mr. Gilder wrote in these pages: