But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that _are about to become unimportant_ and those that _are about to emerge_. In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism brought against THE LITTLE REVIEW is that it goes to artistic and emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go. I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real _lengths_—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though THE LITTLE REVIEW had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes has been a hope that preaching will help. There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad. Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our audience.