But this is not all, nor half.  A man ought to express himself, ought to live his own life, say his own little say, before silence comes.  The “say” may be bad—­a mere yawp, and silence might be more becoming.  But the same argument would make a man dissatisfied with his own nose if it happened to be ugly.  It’s his nose, and he must content himself.  So it’s his yawp and he must let it go.

I’m not going to make the new magazine my own megaphone—­you may be sure of that.  It will nevertheless contain my general interpretation of things, in which I swear I do believe!  The first thing, of course, is to establish it.  Then it can be shaped more nearly into what I wish it to become.  If it seem unmannerly, aggressive, I know no other way to make it heard.  If it died, then the game would be up.  Well, we seem to have established it at once.  It promises not to cost us a penny of investment.

Now, the magazines need new topics.  They have all threshed over old straw for many years.  There is one new subject, to my thinking worth all the old ones:  the new impulse in American life, the new feeling of nationality, our coming to realize ourselves.  To my mind there is greater promise in democracy than men of any preceding period ever dared dream of—­aggressive democracy—­growth by action.  Our writers (the few we have) are yet in the pre-democratic era.  When men’s imaginations lay hold on the things that already begin to appear above the horizon, we shall have something worth reading.  At present I can do no more than bawl out, “See! here are new subjects.”  One of these days somebody will come along who can write about them.  I have started out without a writer.  Fiske is under contract, James would give nothing more to the Atlantic, you were ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers.  Beyond these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women.  I can (soon) get all that I could ever have got in the Atlantic and new ones (I know they’ll come) whom I could never have got there.

You’ll see—­within a year or two—­by far a better magazine than I have ever made; and you and I will differ in nothing unless you feel despair about the breakdown of certain democratic theories, which I think were always mere theories.  Let ’em go!  The real thing, which is life and action, is better.

Heartily and always your grateful friend,
Walter H. Page