We are a new people. Our country is a great international whirlpool of ideas. New music, old music, new theories, old theories, new pictures, old pictures, new standards, old standards meet here and are spun about us with hysteria-like speed. We do not want to appear ignorant of the newest thought or the oldest convention. We strive for an impossible universalism, and we accept many a mountebank at his face value because we are unable to settle his true worth, immediately, and because we feel that we must give a decision immediately. Our credulity is stretched almost to the breaking point every hour of every day of the year, for wonders seem never to cease and the quality of the genuine has given rise to the quantity of the false. We are gullible because we as a nation are alive to the possibility of the impossible. We have gained a reputation for loving to be cheated because we have the almost national virtue of being able to lose, smile, and again strive, BUT we do not love it. And in the end the only one who really loses is the charlatan who sooner or later awakens to a realization of the bare hollowness of his false and petty philosophy, "the public likes to be humbugged." The New York Letter GEORGE SOULE The future of _The Century_ is the engrossing topic among the writers and publishers in New York. No startling change in editorial policy is contemplated. Possibly the perception of the modern and future world which the magazine has begun to show under the guidance of Mr. Yard will be more apparent. The principal topic for speculation, however, is whether a "high-class" illustrated magazine selling for thirty-five cents can be a financial success, or even self-supporting. It is an open secret that none of them has been making money for some time. With this question readers who are interested in the contents of _The Century_ have no concern except the single rather important one that if present conditions continue long enough the magazine will cease to exist, at least in its present form. Here, as in every other literary field, the strengthening of the machinery of commerce has enabled the product of transient popularity to interfere seriously with the thing that is done for its own sake. The "lowbrow" rules. An illustrated magazine is made possible by its advertising, and the advertisers want large circulation. Some of them do, it is true, look also for "quality" of circulation, but their standard of quality has nothing to do with taste, literary or otherwise; it measures merely "spending power." And the aristocracy of intellect has only a shadowy identity with the aristocracy of wealth. There are thousands of "automobile owners" who would never think of wading through even an _Atlantic Monthly_ article.