What he saw in the position was not the need to know women; he could employ women for that purpose.  He perceived clearly that the editor of a magazine was largely an executive:  his was principally the work of direction; of studying currents and movements, watching their formation, their tendency, their efficacy if advocated or translated into actuality, and then selecting from the horizon those that were for the best interests of the home.  For a home was something which Edward Bok did understand.  He had always lived in one; had struggled to keep it together, and he knew every inch of the hard road that makes for domestic permanence amid adverse financial conditions.  And at the home he aimed rather than at the woman in it.

And with his own limited knowledge of the sex, he needed, and none knew it better than did he, the ablest women he could obtain to help him realize his ideals.  Their personal opinions of him did not matter so long as he could command their best work.  Sooner or later, when his purposes were better understood, they might alter those opinions.  For that he could afford to wait.  But he could not wait to get their work.

By this time the editor had come to see that the power of a magazine might lie more securely behind the printed page than in it.  He had begun to accustom his readers to writing to his editors upon all conceivable problems.

This he decided to encourage.  He employed an expert in each line of feminine endeavor, upon the distinct understanding that the most scrupulous attention should be given to her correspondence:  that every letter, no matter how inconsequential, should be answered quickly, fully, and courteously, with the questioner always encouraged to come again if any problem of whatever nature came to her.  He told his editors that ignorance on any question was a misfortune, not a crime; and he wished their correspondence treated in the most courteous and helpful spirit.

Step by step, the editor built up this service behind the magazine until he had a staff of thirty-five editors on the monthly pay-roll; in each issue, he proclaimed the willingness of these editors to answer immediately any questions by mail, he encouraged and cajoled his readers to form the habit of looking upon his magazine as a great clearing-house of information.  Before long, the letters streamed in by the tens of thousands during a year.  The editor still encouraged, and the total ran into the hundreds of thousands, until during the last year, before the service was finally stopped by the Great War in 1917, the yearly correspondence totalled nearly a million letters.

[Illustration:  The Grandmother, who counselled each of her children to make the world a better and more beautiful place to live in—­a counsel which is now being carried on by her grandchildren, one of whom is Edward Bok.]