Thus the fact that Page’s new magazine was intended for a popular audience was not the result of accident, but of design.  It represented a periodical plan which had long been taking shape in Page’s mind.  The things that he had been doing for the Forum and the Atlantic he aspired to do for a larger audience than that to which publications of this character could appeal.  Scholar though Page was, and lover of the finest things in literature that he had always been, yet this sympathy and interest had always lain with the masses.  Perhaps it is impossible to make literature democratic, but Page believed that he would be genuinely serving the great cause that was nearest his heart if he could spread wide the facts of the modern world, especially the facts of America, and if he could clothe the expression in language which, while always dignified and even “literary,” would still be sufficiently touched with the vital, the picturesque, and the “human,” to make his new publication appeal to a wide audience of intelligent, everyday Americans.  It was thus part of his general programme of improving the status of the average man, and it formed a logical part of his philosophy of human advancement.  For the only acceptable measure of any civilization, Page believed, was the extent to which it improved the condition of the common citizen.  A few cultured and university-trained men at the top; a few ancient families living in luxury; a few painters and poets and statesmen and generals; these things, in Page’s view, did not constitute a satisfactory state of society; the real test was the extent to which the masses participated in education, in the necessities and comforts of existence, in the right of self-evolution and self-expression, in that “equality of opportunity,” which, Page never wearied of repeating, “was the basis of social progress.”  The mere right to vote and to hold office was not democracy; parliamentary majorities and political caucuses were not democracy—­at the best these things were only details and not the most important ones; democracy was the right of every man to enjoy, in accordance with his aptitudes of character and mentality, the material and spiritual opportunities that nature and science had placed at the disposition of mankind.  This democratic creed had now become the dominating interest of Page’s life.  From this time on it consumed all his activities.  His new magazine set itself first of all to interpret the American panorama from this point of view; to describe the progress that the several parts of the country were making in the several manifestations of democracy—­education, agriculture, industry, social life, politics—­and the importance that Page attached to them was practically in the order named.  Above all it concerned itself with the men and women who were accomplishing most in the definite realization of this great end.