It would be enlightening to give the professor an opportunity to try his plan. Let some millionaire, instead of starting a new college, endow a critical magazine for the professor. In the first number should be announced the fixed standards by which all literature is to be judged. Then would follow calm, irrefutable issues in which the principles of unity, coherence, emphasis and perhaps one or two other measures, should be applied to new literature. The public, eager for standard articles, would, of course, never again read Hall Caine and Harold Bell Wright. The commercialization of literature would be abolished, for would not the professor declare it to be against the decalogue? And there would arise a new generation of writers, carefully observing all academic rules, and scrupulously giving the public full measure of what it wants. A veritable Utopia, an apotheosis of the grocer-shop! But, however much we may doubt the possibility of such a thing, we cannot oppose the professor, because he has disarmed opposition by predicting it. Of course, he says in effect, there will arise hordes of young, ill-seasoned, and irresponsible persons who will deny my sound position. But don't let them trouble you; they are of a piece with all the queer people who nowadays are advancing preposterous new ideas. As if anything that is not sanctioned by tradition could possibly be taken seriously! Very well, we won't oppose the professor. We are quite willing to let him go ahead pigeon-holing the kind of literature that appeals to him, and anything he may be able to do in turning the public taste from Hall Caine deserves approbation. But in the meantime we shall assiduously forget about him, and try some experiments of our own in the effort to say vital things about literature. In the first place, we don't believe in the majority rule for writers. We don't believe that a writer ever lived who wrote anything really good because he thought the reading public wanted it. Our conviction is based on the testimony of writers themselves. A writer should write what is in him, not what is in the public. He has no excuse for writing unless he is a stronger, more sensitive, and more intelligent man than either his readers or his critics. That is the first distinction between the manufacturer of sausages and the maker of books.