I feel we all owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing out the
facts so clearly, and believe that you will like to know what has
taken place.
While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and
ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly
to accept the lion's share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W. Burrows of
Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression
of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of
the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing
energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that
the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon
the country.
Demos is a good fellow--when he behaves himself, and that generally means
when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to
say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the
scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal
aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.
* * * * *
Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it
permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from
another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation
of a friend, writes:
"I am told it is the best gentleman's magazine in the United
States."
Now, somehow, "gentleman" is a word that we are very chary of using. We
couldn't put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no
inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it--and that
we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that it was
just what we were after--that it includes, or ought to include, about
everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation, it is
certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.
* * * * *
Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the
_Casserole_ of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we
were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous
contentment with existing conditions. This inference was probably drawn
from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man's fortune depends
more upon himself than upon his conditions.
As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure to call
attention to the following still more remarkable one. It is from a
printer--not one in our employ.
I wish to congratulate you on the excellence of the REVIEW, both
from a literary and mechanical standpoint. As a "worker," "a
member of the Union," it might be inferred that I endorse the
views of the critics given on page 432 of the second number. Not
so. It is such views as his that harm the unthinking--those who
think capital is the emblem of wickedness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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