The lack of opportunity for an education in Bok’s own life led him to cast about for some plan whereby an education might be obtained without expense by any one who desired.  He finally hit upon the simple plan of substituting free scholarships for the premiums then so frequently offered by periodicals for subscriptions secured.  Free musical education at the leading conservatories was first offered to any girl who would secure a certain number of subscriptions to The Ladies’ Home Journal, the complete offer being a year’s free tuition, with free room, free board, free piano in her own room, and all travelling expenses paid.  The plan was an immediate success:  the solicitation of a subscription by a girl desirous of educating herself made an irresistible appeal.

This plan was soon extended, so as to include all the girls’ colleges, and finally all the men’s colleges, so that a free education might be possible at any educational institution.  So comprehensive it became that to the close of 1919, one thousand four hundred and fifty-five free scholarships had been awarded.  The plan has now been in operation long enough to have produced some of the leading singers and instrumental artists of the day, whose names are familiar to all, as well as instructors in colleges and scores of teachers; and to have sent several score of men into conspicuous positions in the business and professional world.

Edward Bok has always felt that but for his own inability to secure an education, and his consequent desire for self-improvement, the realization of the need in others might not have been so strongly felt by him, and that his plan whereby thousands of others were benefited might never have been realized.

It was this comprehensive personal service, built up back of the magazine from the start, that gave the periodical so firm and unique a hold on its clientele.  It was not the printed word that was its chief power:  scores of editors who have tried to study and diagnose the appeal of the magazine from the printed page, have remained baffled at the remarkable confidence elicited from its readers.  They never looked back of the magazine, and therefore failed to discover its secret.  Bok went through three financial panics with the magazine, and while other periodicals severely suffered from diminished circulation at such times, The Ladies’ Home Journal always held its own.  Thousands of women had been directly helped by the magazine; it had not remained an inanimate printed thing, but had become a vital need in the personal lives of its readers.

So intimate had become this relation, so efficient was the service rendered, that its readers could not be pried loose from it; where women were willing and ready, when the domestic pinch came, to let go of other reading matter, they explained to their husbands or fathers that The Ladies’ Home Journal was a necessity—­they did not feel that they could do without it.  The very quality for which the magazine had been held up to ridicule by the unknowing and unthinking had become, with hundreds of thousands of women, its source of power and the bulwark of its success.