I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of _The Masses_. The group that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd with all its hope and despair, much better than the crowd knows itself. They are interpreting the crowd. The mass would never like _The Masses_. It is too true. It is not got up for them. _The Cosmopolitan_ is the ideal of the mass. _The Masses_ is for the few brave spirits who want to know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the sunshine. _The Masses_ to my mind has as broad a range of feeling reflected in its pages as any magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light, shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too, as you say. But isn’t mud a part of life? In some respects mud is the condition of life. The great need of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is like the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or it will die. _The Masses_ to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into magazine form, and to read it understandingly is to put the roots of the soul down into the earth where they should be if a healthy growth is desired. One could get too much of that contact of course, but that is another matter. _FREE POETS v. FREE VERSE._ [As Mr. Carter suggests in the following letter, reprinted from _The Egoist_, I hope THE LITTLE REVIEW agree with Mr. Aldington’s point of view. I hope the latter may be induced to answer Mr. Carter at length in the same issue.—_The Editor._] _To the Editor, The Egoist_