EDITORS, even an editor as iconoclastic as Henry L. Mencken, are at heart believers. Mencken, who never ceased to rage against ignorance, lived with the belief that in the American language our native writers, blending the heritage of many bloodstreams, would one day produce literature of surpassing freshness and vitality. He looked for signs that this was coming and found enough of them to keep him hopeful. Indeed an editor like a teacher must fix his eyes on a polestar of such magnitude if he is to maintain his sense of direction in the midst of all the fogs and crosscurrents which daily become more distracting in this atomic age. The star by which I steer is Literature, and what concerns me is whether enough of our young people have anything more than a flickering interest in the light which has sustained me. Is it true that English, whether written or spoken, by high school seniors and college freshmen, has been steadily deteriorating in this country since the end of the Second World War?

The evidence is contradictory. Since 1946 I have spoken on the campuses of over one hundred and fifty colleges and universities. On my visits I invariably hear from the Deans of Admission and from members of the English Departments the complaint that the entering freshmen are ill-prepared, that they come to college with less and less reading, and that as a result most of freshman year has to be spent getting them ready to study freshman English. Yet on these very same campuses, I frequently find small groups of upperclassmen who are wholly absorbed in the writing which they are doing under the direction of an inspired teacher. Wallace Stegner at Leland Stanford, Hudson Strode at the University of Alabama, Edwin L. Peterson at the University of Pittsburgh, and Carroll Towle at the University of New Hampshire, the Avery Hopwood classes at Ann Arbor, English 77 at Yale, the personal direction which at Harvard Theodore Morrison provides in fiction and Archibald MacLeish in poetry ---these are just a few of the electrically charged circles which, like Robert Hillyer's classes at Delaware, lift the student out and up into a different world.

Both things seem to be going on at the same time: among the many a slackening of interest and effort, a blindness toward poetry, a disdain for reading, a feeling that English of classic beauty is for the birds; among the few that blazing intensity of endeavor which a beginning writer must experience. My concern is lest the apathy be extended. To me the love for books is inseparable from that sense of wonder which we all know however briefly in our adolescence, and what I am seeking is some way to exhilarate the experience of learning, especially the learning of English when we are at the sunrise of our education.

All education is an awakening, and the teachers of English are the buglers who bring us to our feet. My friend George F. Kennan, our former ambassador to Russia, came to New England to address the school audiences at Exeter and Andover. He spoke to them much as he would have spoken to a college convocation --- and his English is distinctive --- about our relations with Russia; he gave his reasons for believing that we shall avoid war, and he was deeply impressed by the spirit of inquiry and the maturity which he found in both of those big audiences. "What responsive, open-minded boys they are," he said to me afterwards, and then after a moment's reflection he added, "They seem so different from the guarded, diffident, rather lonely undergraduates one sees on campus." We are all aware of that change and of the inner uncertainty, the dread of army life, the feeling of nervous insecurity which bring it about. Is there any prescription for opening minds and for keeping them open?

In the beginning was the word --- and it was read aloud. Our very first memory of books is of the voice of a woman ---mother, favorite aunt, or teacher --- who gave us the unforgettable pictures we retain of Bob, Son of Battle, of Mowgli, and of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. My family were great ones for Mark Twain. I cut my teeth on A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, and when I first heard Mark's description of the Yankee standing before all the court as naked as a pair of scissors, I literally rolled on the floor with laughter. I think Mark Twain is much better to begin with than Dickens; there is something too brutal and too bleak about Dickens. A book like Life on the Mississippi is an American adventure told so naturally that a boy can identify himself with the cub pilot who ran away from home. There is something very persuasive about being read to, and in these days when there is so little privacy in the home, and when television and recorded music fill every evening hour, perhaps the only remaining place where a child will hear a cultivated reading voice in quiet is in the schoolroom.

The veneration for the beautiful but dumb athlete has long since passed its peak in the Eastern colleges, and on many a campus the boy of intellect, the boy in the top tenth, who can edit, act, or write, is as highly regarded as a halfback. This form of compensation has been slow to reach the state universities of the Midwest and slower still to reach down into the high schools, but it is coming and as it comes it will enlarge the opportunities for what Gilbert Murray and John Masefield so encouraged at Boar's Hill --- the reading of plays, the reading of epic poetry aloud. The chance to act in a serious play ---no one can possibly take part in Thornton Wilder's Our Town without yielding to the compassion of the lines --- the incentive to appear in prize speaking and debating give students a memorization of clear forceful English some of which may stay in mind for life.

We live in a country which places too little value on the precise use of words. Partly this is the fault of those advertisers who commercialize cheap, bad English; partly it is the fault of the ghost writers who prepare the speeches for public men; mostly it is the fault of parents who are too careless to correct their children. America is the home of the ten-cent cigar and the nickel phrase, the cheap cliché endlessly repeated; the home of bastard words like "contacted" and "winterized"; of barbarisms like "think for real" and "tastes good like a cigarette should"; of glibness like "as of now" and "but definitely"; of sheer nonsense like "irregardless" and "rather unique" (unique is one of a kind; it is either unique or it is not --- there can be no qualifier!).

I am not inveighing against American slang or American idiom, for they are, both of them, a muscular part of our new writing. What I am inveighing against is the American habit of using popular clichés without thinking.

How is one aroused to an awareness of words? I know it can be done, for it was done to me. At Harvard when I was trying to build up my vocabulary, it was Dean Briggs who encouraged me to carry slips of paper in my pocket. On one side I would write down a word that was new to me and that I was eager to acquire, and on the reverse I would write down its meaning and a sample phrase in which it was used. Harvard undergraduates spend a good deal of time shuttling back and forth between the austerities of Cambridge and the amenities of Boston, and on those subway rides between Harvard Square and Park Street I shuffled the slips and let the meaning sink in; so I became familiar with new words, words as fancy as "dichotomy" which happened to be a professor's cliché at the moment.

It is stimulating to watch Conrad's choice of the adverbs which give color and verve to his paragraphs. (Henry James said the adverb was always a controlling word in a sentence.) Students should be proud of using new words in their themes; they should be permitted to use slang, and to look for whatever dialect is still characteristic in their part of the country. When I joined the Atlantic staff in 1924, about one short story in every four was written in dialect. They came to us in Pennsylvania Dutch, in the dialect of the Kentucky mountaineers, and from the Cajun country in Louisiana. They were written in Swedish, Jewish, Irish dialect, and in the accents of the Negro. Today dialect is fading from the scene and the reason is clear enough; writers want to be thought of as essentially American, not as part of a minority, and what is more they remember that those old stories in dialect were too often an excuse for farce or for sentiment rather than the heartfelt truth.

But local color is irrepressible in this country and always will be; it crops out everywhere, and students should be encouraged to listen for it and use it to good effect.

The economy of the war years is to blame for the watering down of instruction in English. Reading is not as well taught as it used to be. I agree that the flash-card system is swifter, yet it has enormously increased the difficulty of those who are inclined to be left readers, and although there is no way of proving it, I believe it has produced some of the worst spellers the country has ever seen. As for writing, the only way to learn to write is to write, and I deplore the doing away of the daily theme and of the essay type of question on examinations. I realize that during the war there simply was not enough manpower available to correct these themes, and so it seemed economical to place the emphasis on questions of identification which could be corrected by machines. But there is no doubt that the writing, the writing of the vast majority, has suffered.

Finally, and most important, how can we induce in the eighteen-year-old a curiosity and then a desire for books? Teachers and their allies the librarians are, I sometimes think, our last resort in the impressionable years. The libraries today are a sanctuary for the quiet reflective child. Some children, a few, are still fond of quiet, and here in their part of the library with the low shelves, the comfortable chairs and the story hour, their minds can begin to feed and to imagine. If the zest for reading is aroused by ten, it won't stop. As we grow older, we begin to take tips from those we respect. I remember in my freshman year a Sunday afternoon walk I had with Geoffrey Parsons, then the editor of the New York Tribune. Parsons was an omnivorous reader, and in that walk by the sea he fired my imagination by what he said about three books I had never heard of: Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, and The Life of Oscar Wilde by Frank Harris. One way or another I managed to borrow all three of them in the course of the next week.

These were impressive experiences, and I embarked on another which went deeper and lasted longer when as an undergraduate I heard Christopher Morley tell of the excitement of reading Keats's poems against the background of Keats's letters. One has to be a little bit in love to get the best out of that experience, and I was. Today if I found myself walking with an inquiring freshman I would surely tell him about As I Remember Him, by Dr. Hans Zinsser; I would speak of Virginia Woolf's luminous essays in The Common Reader, which seem to me the quintessence of biography and criticism; I would talk to him about Archibald MacLeish's play, "J.B.," and about the courage, the unshakable values, and magnificent descriptive writing in Dr. Zhivago.

First and last it is the teacher of English who must arouse us. She --- in four cases out of five it is a woman --- knows us with an almost medical intimacy, and she has it in her power to aim us in a way which will change our lives. If she notices that we have a strange attraction for frogs, mud turtles, and garter snakes, she will see that a book about animals, a mature book like Tom Barbour's Naturalist at Large, comes into our ken. If our eyes light up at the mention of the Knights of the Round Table, she will know how to make Malory and Tennyson approachable. If we talk of a grandfather who came across the country in a covered wagon, she will remember The Oregon Trail, A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, and that other fine book, The Forty-niners by Archer B. Hulbert. Lincoln's Birthday may prompt her to read aloud some chapters from Marching On, that brave novel by James Boyd, and the day before Washington's Birthday --- always the day before a holiday --- she might read to us Samuel Eliot Morison's superb essay on "Washington as a Young Man." And even if we resist books with all our might, even if the sports page is all that we hanker for, she may still leave with us, deep in the subconscious, echoes of a beauty we can never quite forget.

In the fall of 1920 a hulking young Southerner, Thomas Clayton Wolfe, of Asheville, North Carolina, then in his twenty-first year, came to Harvard to study for his master's degree. I remember seeing him in the Harvard Yard with his huge shoulders and his striking dark features. He was a rather lonely student, and in his moments of self-doubt his thoughts turned back to the woman who had taught him in Asheville, Mrs. J. M. Roberts. What she meant to him shines out in this letter which he wrote from Cambridge to Mr. Frank Wells, then Superintendent of Schools in Asheville:

My friend and former teacher, Mrs. J. M. Roberts, has lately written me, explaining that some testimonial is desired as to her quality as a teacher, and asking me if I would care to record any opinion I have on that subject. I esteem it an honor and a privilege to do this, although I find myself in constant difficulties when I try to keep my pen from leaping away with a red-hot panegyric.

But --- with all the moderation and temperance and earnestness at my command I can do no less than consider Mrs. Roberts as one of the three great teachers who have ever taught me, --- this with all honor to Harvard, who has not yet succeeded in adding a fourth name to my own Hall of Fame.

More than anyone else I have ever known, Mrs. Roberts succeeded in getting under my skull with an appreciation of what is fine and altogether worth while in literature. That, in my opinion, is the vital quality. That is the essential thing --- the mark of a real teacher.

I didn't know, until Mrs. Roberts wrote me, that she had no University degree, but that is a matter of not the slightest consequence to me. So far does she surpass certain college graduates I know, who are teaching, in respect to actual knowledge, appreciation, and the ability to stimulate and inspire, that any difficulty as to a degree would be negligible, I think.

I have spoken of Mrs. Roberts merely as a teacher. This is perhaps the only testimonial you want. But I cannot stop before I speak of another matter that has been of the highest importance to me. During the years Mrs. Roberts taught me she exercised an influence that is inestimable on almost every particular of my life and thought.

With the other boys of my age I know she did the same. We turned instinctively to this lady for her advice and direction and we trusted to it unfalteringly.

I think that kind of relation is one of the profoundest experiences of anyone's life, --- I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to her son and I don't think I could say more than this.

You can readily understand that the intimacy of such a relation is much more important in those formative years at grammar school or high school than afterwards at college. At college you don't get it but you don't need it so much. The point is that I did get it at a time when it was supremely important that I get it. It is, therefore, impossible that I ever forget the influence of Mrs. Roberts. She is one of my great people, and happy are those who can claim her as their teacher!

In those words so charged with affection, Thomas Wolfe speaks for all of us who can never forget what we owe to those who taught us English.

WHAT happens to Walden Pond happens to us all. This small, green oasis, sacred to the memory of Henry Thoreau, is a symbol of the privacy which we are in the act of surrendering straight across the country. Water and privacy are today the two natural resources in short supply throughout the United States. Have any people on earth ever changed the face of their country as fast as we Americans? The Egyptians who made up in slave labor what we possess in bulldozers and power saws had nothing like our speed, and it took them more than a millennium to arrive at the desert which is theirs today. The English and Canadians seem to lack our rapacity for tearing down, for "modernizing" what is old.

We do our engulfing in the name of progress; nothing must impede "the wheels of progress," and nothing does. Today those wheels which have the light touch of a tank are being accelerated by the pressure of numbers, by our current mania for bigger and faster roads, and by the incredible growth of a hard-top, ranch-house suburbia. Like lava from Etna, this pressure of numbers overflows the countryside, filling in meadows and marshes, felling the woodlands, forcing the brooks underground. Nothing is impregnable. If old avenues of oaks or maples stand in the way of a new road, down they come; if the new Colby College campus is an obstruction to the plans of a throughway, surely the campus can give; if larger bathing facilities are needed in Middlesex County, why not Walden Pond?

Next to Boston, the village of Concord is the most visited, most revered shrine in New England. Concord is a self-respecting community, conscious that it has a dual responsibility in tending to the past and planning for the future. It is proud of its schools; it takes care of its trees (grieving as we all do about the ravage of the elms); and through private guardianship and public interest, it has preserved as much as it could of its famous heritage --- such landmarks as Wright's Tavern, the Old Manse, the Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne houses, and "the battlefield." But a pond is harder to preserve.

Walden Pond is a little cup of blue water set in the woods within easy walking distance of Concord center; it is spring-fed and has no outlet, so that the level of the lake rises unpredictably. It is not large, half a mile long by three eighths of a mile wide; and it is very deep, 107 feet by Thoreau's measurement in certain places. The Emersons owned a large part of the shore, and Ralph Waldo in 1845 gave Thoreau permission to build a hut of the native white pine and to cultivate a two-acre bean plot. Henry Thoreau was then twenty-eight, rebellious, a nonconformist, with no job; the job he set himself was to live for two years beside this "forest mirror" until he knew its every mood. The record of Walden and himself which he left in his great book has made the spot a shrine for all Americans and has brought back to it year after year pilgrims who take the shore path thinking to see what Thoreau saw a hundred and ten years ago.

Thoreau was never to know what his sense of privacy had done to this sylvan spot. Walden has its vulnerable points, being bounded at one end by the railroad and at the other by a highway. For a time the railroad ran regular excursions even in Thoreau's day, but these ceased when Ford made it easier to go by car. In 1922 Emerson's grandsons gave the pond and land into the protection of the Commonwealth with the sole purpose of "preserving the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau, its shores and woodlands, for the public who wish to enjoy the pond, the woods and nature, including bathing, boating, fishing and picnicking." It is significant that the word "preserving" comes ahead of "enjoy."

But in the decades since the gift, the town and the state have treated Walden as a recreation area. The accommodations were gradual, but they added up to a casualness for which both are to blame. A dock and refreshment stand were natural enough for the modest bathing beach. But it didn't stay modest long. A trailer colony moved in, with the town fathers' acquiescence ---not, of course, on the shore line, but across the road. And after that came hot-dog stands and filling stations. Throngs from the west of Boston come to swim in Walden and to picnic on the shore --- ten thousand or more on a summer Sunday --- and they leave behind them what Edwin Way Teale, the naturalist, calls "fearful and wonderful evidence of America's high standard of living." In his book North with the Spring, Mr. Teale describes a walk which he and his wife took at Deep Cove one July morning in 1949, and as they walked the shore line close to the sight of Thoreau's cabin, this is a list of what they found: "116 beer cans, 21 milk bottles, Coca-Cola bottles, the remains of 14 campfires, a shoe box, eggshells, soap, half-eaten sandwiches, Dixie cups, cracker boxes, soda straws, cigarette packages, comic books, tabloid newspapers, playing cards, broken glass, paper napkins, mustard bottles, firecrackers, banana peels, orange skins, a baby-food jar, a piece of pink ribbon, the thumb of a leather glove, a flashlight battery, and a dollar bill." Since 1950 conditions at Walden in this respect have changed for the better. Bathing is no longer permitted in the Cove, and such litter as survives, we hope, has gone underground. I mention the horror list to show what could so easily happen again if safeguards were relaxed.

In the spring of 1957 Walden once more was in jeopardy. The county decided to widen the bathing beach by another three hundred feet, and to make the shelving shore shallow enough for a live-saving course for children. And on May 14 the Massachusetts legislature voted $50,000 to "improve" Walden. Bulldozers moved in and an area of an acre and a half was denuded; eighty-six trees of varying ages came down, and the gravel thus exposed was bulldozed into the lake to fill in the potholes that might be dangerous to the children. This is perfectly reasonable, if all one thinks about is recreation.

The donors, W. Cameron Forbes, Edward W. Forbes, and Alexander Forbes, are still alive as I write this. They knew what they were doing in their deed of gift when they stressed the word "preserving," and they detest the present invasion, as their letter to the New York Times of August 27, 1957 made clear. The men in charge of the "improvement," who knew what they were doing but not what they were ruining, are the county commissioners of Middlesex, and their original plans called for a hard-top parking area and a hundred-foot concrete bathhouse.

It should be clear to anyone that there is now a deep conflict of interests between those who wish to enlarge Walden's facilities for recreation and those who wish to preserve the reservation as you would preserve a stand of giant redwoods or Valley Forge. In this predicament there must be a moderator, and the historic site should be taken out of the hands of the county officials and placed either under the protection of the state park department or the nation. If recreation is the only aim, the next step will be outboard motors, water skis, and a Walden Sextet in bathing suits. Seriously, better precautions must be taken. There must be a limit to the number of bathers in a pond of this size with no outlet. (Several mothers I know will no longer permit their children to swim there in the crowded season.) Finally, people should be encouraged to visit Walden for the privacy and secret beauty which is so rare as to be almost nonexistent in suburbia.

This has been a battle between the short view and the long view, and when I vote for the long view, I do so remembering Thoreau's words: "Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs." So keep it.

Yes, but who shall be the guardian? Walden, like the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, like Georgetown and the ancient portions of Charleston, South Carolina, like Beacon Hill, like Chestnut Street in Salem and Main Street, Nantucket --- Walden is a living reminder of a treasured past. It must not be hedged in by hamburger heavens nor made odoriferous with the town dump; it must be protected, if not by voluntary action then by federal law, for just as truly as Mount Vernon it is a reminder of privacy, of beauty, and of the character which we look for in national monuments.

WHEN we are young we take all natural beauty for granted. But because memory has a way of treasuring certain special moments, these come back to us unsummoned across the years. The spring robin I heard calling above a wet lawn on West Jersey Street --- a shower had just passed --- in 1908, I have heard a hundred times since; the sweet peas, dew-fresh, on the Nimmicks' latticework which I used to pass on my way to the beach just as the July sun was warming their perfume; the moonlight which made pools of darkness under our maples on Clinton Place --- I never meant to keep these, but there they are.

It is a sign of age that as our time becomes limited, so we become concerned about other objects as destructible as ourselves. It never occurred to me to worry about the elms, not in my senior year in the Harvard Yard when a blizzard turned to sleet, hung them with snow and crystal, and broke down their tops and limbs. The damage was dismissed with the thought that you can always plant new ones. I only realized later how indispensable those old trees in their sunlight and shade were in the Yard.

The American elm is a New England character. It dates the oldest house; its wineglass silhouette is a landmark in the meadow; its branches make a summer cloister of the old streets in Williamstown, Danversport, or Salem; with the lilac bush it is the living memorial guarding the deserted farm. Or it used to be. It has been called "the patriot tree" --- under its boughs treaties were signed with the Indians, Washington took command of an army; George Whitefield, the evangelist, preached to thousands on Boston Common under the Great Tree; under the elm came the rushing fierce embrace of the homecomings after Appomattox. You measure trees with your eyes, and the sight of an old elm makes you feel younger, and surer that good things last.

A century ago, when the Atlantic was in its second year, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table sent out this call for a biography of distinguished trees. "I wish," wrote Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "somebody would get up the following work:

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees taken upon the same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter Press Descriptions by a Distinguished Literary Gentleman . . ." Thirty-two years later the very book was produced, Typical Elms and Other Trees of Massachusetts, a handsome green and gold folio with superb plates by Henry Brooks, the text by Lorin L. Dame, and the introduction by Dr. Holmes.

A labor of love, long out of print, it leads one back to a time when men seemed to revere trees more than we do. The early settlers of New England inherited from their English ancestors a desire for shade trees. In front of the new house for the bride, the bridegroom planted the memorial elm. The elm was their first choice and the reasons, says Mr. Dame, are obvious: it is a rapid grower, requires little care, admits of the severest pruning where branches come dangerously close to the roof, and combines in a remarkable degree size and beauty and shade. The French botanist Michaux termed it "the most magnificent vegetable of the temperate zones."

There are twenty-four superb photographs of elms here, and often we are shown two of the same tree --- the one in its copious foliage, the other of its magnificent bare architecture in winter. These pictures were taken in the day of the buggy, the dirt road and the stovepipe hat, and they give one the view of another century.

There is a story about every one of these famous trees. The Whittemore Elm in Arlington was set out in 1724 by Samuel Whittemore in front of his house. A Minuteman at the age of eighty, he was shot and left for dead at the roadside. But he recovered and lived on to enjoy the shade of that fine tree until he was a hundred and one. (Postscript: When they widened the road, the highway moved off to one side to preserve that landmark.) For three centuries the oldest tree on Boston Common was of course known as the Great Tree, and it was so designated on the maps. Planted about 1640, it suffered from its first major cavity a hundred years later; a tree dentist of the period cleaned out the rot, filled the aperture with "clay, and other substances," and then bandaged it with canvas. The big beauty lived on until February 1876, and when the winter gales finally destroyed it, citizens rushed to the spot and took home slabs and cuttings for table tops and chairs. The Washington Elm, which stood close to the Cambridge Common, is shown at two stages: in its full foliage in 1870, and in its spindly decrepitude in 1889 ---top gone, big limbs sawed off, the stumps tarred, dying. Just worn out as most elms are that pass one hundred and fifty.

Today the whole Yankee species of elms is threatened by the Dutch elm beetle. The Wethersfield Elm, the great tree of Connecticut, which stood up under the hurricane of '38, succumbed to the beetles; the big beauties in Williamstown are, many of them, in danger; and the same ravage can be seen in Concord, Salem, Deerfield, or on any old country road. People speak of the pin oak and of the Norway maple as a better substitute for replanting, but I say "Don't despair."

The blight of the elm is not as desperate as that which wiped out the chestnut. Some of the veterans have shown surprising immunity --- as, for instance, the Big Elm in Framingham, not far from Route 9, said to have been planted in 1775; the Whipping Post Elm and the Signpost Elm in Litchfield, Connecticut, are both well into their second century and both immune; so are the three ancient elms in Greenwich which have withstood twenty years of the Dutch elm contagion. The tree warden of Greenwich deserves praise for this, for he has labored mightily to preserve his more than six thousand public elms. What we need are more exacting tree wardens in every community, who will demand that the deadwood so easily infested be removed. And more spraying. For the American elm is hardier than the European species and it is just as ideal for civilization as it once was for the country town. It stands any amount of tramping, its roots survive under pavements, its form and foliage are of a beauty that cannot be replaced. Plant on!

It is hard for us to believe that trees were regarded as an enemy by the western pioneer. Trees stood in the way of his planting and they shut out his sunlight. The virgin forests which once covered Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio with their impenetrable gloom into which a child might disappear forever were an enemy to be burned, axed, and uprooted. So the settler won his clearing and the forests thinned out. The story is told with unforgettable fidelity in that fine short novel The Trees, by Conrad Richter. My partner Donald Snyder, whose pioneer ancestors fought their way into the clear in Indiana, has a copy of that book stored away for his grandchildren so that they can understand what the virgin forests were really like.

After the settler came the lumberman and the sawmill, cutting for the needed houses and furniture and, ever increasingly, for the wood pulp from which comes newsprint. A few of the early lumber firms such as Weyerhaeuser, Pope & Talbot, and the Simpson Logging Company, all of which had extensive holdings in the Pacific Northwest, operated with a conscience, but they were the exception, not the rule.

Among the early lumbermen were William C. Talbot who hailed from East Machias, Maine, and Andrew J. Pope from Boston; they came to the West with the Forty-niners; they were experienced in shipping, and the first in San Francisco to fill the need for "windows, doors, sashes, and knees"; they prospered in the Gold Rush; their fleet doubled in the Civil War; their lumber schooners held a commanding place in the intercoastal trade, and they shipped over 60 million feet of lumber for the rebuilding of San Francisco in 1906, the year of the earthquake. The record of Pope & Talbot --- cutting and planting --- has been graphically related in their centennial volume, Time, Tide and Timber, by Edwin T. Coman, Jr., and Helen M. Gibbs; but as I have said, an operation like this was the exception.

Prior to 1920, the practice was to cut all that was worth cutting, dump your sawdust into the nearest stream, and then move the sawmill to the next likeliest spot. In Nova Scotia I paddled down trout streams which once held good trout, and might still were it not for the immovable, poisonous beds of sawdust dumped there fifty years ago. Too often the slash was left scattered on the ground, an unregarded fire hazard. (Byproducts from this wood waste were unthought of then.)

Fires on such cutover land were to be expected, and when they came were regarded as acts of God, not of man. But the scars are there to remind us, the black spindly skeletons and the brown scorched earth on which no new growth can be expected for years. It is disagreeable to remember that in ten days of October 1947, in a period of great drought, Maine lost 210,000 acres of good forest land to fire at a cost of sixteen lives and 32 millions of dollars. Fire fighters were flown on from Washington and Oregon as there were not enough trained men available in the Northeast; destroyers were sent north to generate power for the burned-out villages. New England forest industries have increased their vigilance since then. They'd better.

The country has been slow to acknowledge what it owes to the early silviculturists, like Edward Olmstead, Charles Sargent and Gifford Pinchot. The first professional forester was not graduated from an American college until 1900. Today there are over 12,500 of them, but they had to have time and experience before they could break down the grandfather heritage ("What my grandfather did was good enough for me!") and really apply the brakes. Only when our virgin timber was depleted, only when the value of all forest products began to rise, did Americans realize that the growing of trees could be a profitable and continuous business.

We are not yet able to achieve the balance between the volume taken by cutting and fire, and the new growth. The imbalance was at its worst about 1909, and it has been aggravated by our desperate need for wood in both wars: in 19-- for instance, we consumed 5 billion board feet with a new growth of approximately 35 billion. There have been years since when the discrepancy has been as bad as that. Misguided cutting has been only partially controlled by standardization of size and length within the industry. Weyerhaeuser and Marathon have taken the lead in converting wood waste and sawdust into products molded and bound under heat and pressure. For the future we must depend on the new growths, and if we protect forests from fire, insects, and disease, if we utilize wood efficiently, and if we harvest timberlands wisely, we may in time come close to balancing the economy of lumbering. A big "if."

The old order passes. Legend has it that the Machias River in Maine was the first on which logs were driven, and there is a tombstone on its bank in memory of a lumberman who was crushed and drowned in the drive of 1790. Today the Machias is the last stream in the United States on which the long logs are still driven with the old-time skill and risk. Close to 8 million feet of long logs come down it a year, and the same may be true for another decade. Then the cycle will be complete.

At this moment of transition, when the trees close to home have become more precious, it is important to increase our control of fire and pest. See what fire has done to the magnificent slopes of upland Maine. Keep an eye out for those beauties of the woods, the white birches (there are two particularly magnificent stands, one in Gorham, New Hampshire, the other at Manchester, Vermont); the birch dieback has been killing these trees from the top throughout New England. Notice the rust in the white pine and the damage of the spruce bud worm, unquestionably the most destructive insect in the Northeast, if not the entire country. Remember the blight that swept away every vestige of the chestnut. (Can anyone tell me of chestnuts that have taken hold again in New England?) Bear in mind that over 3 million elms have been destroyed by the Dutch elm disease. New Haven is, perhaps, the worst sufferer from this invasion, with a loss of more than three thousand trees, most of them the great patriots of the past. Read what the oak wilt is doing in Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. Only one state, and that Pennsylvania, which was lightly hit, has made a complete extermination of this oak wilt.

Ruthless cutting, fire, and disease --- these are the public enemies of our trees. To offset them there are two hopes: the increasing vigilance of Americans devoted to conservation, and the ever-spreading knowledge of tree farming. Tree farming as a popular movement began in the state of Washington ten years ago in the little town of Montesano, a community that has lived on and in the forests for ninety years. People who are going into the business of growing trees need time; they need protection from fire; they need graduated taxes on their wood lots so that the seedlings will not be taxed as heavily as the growing trees twenty years later. They need mechanical planters such as are now capable of planting a thousand seedlings in an hour. Four years ago there were twenty-five such machines in operation. Today there are several thousand.

Tree farming is now being developed in thirty states; a tree farm may be a 10-acre section on a New Hampshire farm, or it may be the 500,000-acre holding of Weyerhaeuser. Every one of us stands to gain from the increase in these farms. If our descendants are to have access to any green oases in the future, woods to picnic in such as I knew in my boyhood, this is how they will come.

LABOR leaders have been talking about a four-and-a-half day week, and this leads me to wonder what people will do with the other two and a half days and so to speculate about American life and taste in the mid-1960s, when we may have this much leisure, if indeed our standard of living continues to rise. I begin by assuming that we shall avoid a major war in the foreseeable future, that our birth rate will continue high, and that old people will live longer. The countryside will continue to fill in at such an alarming speed that a federal authority will be needed to curb the destructiveness of the hit-and-run contractors. During the four-hundred-mile flight from Boston to Washington, the city, as Bill Zeckendorf says "is always below us; only the name changes." This inundation of fluid suburbia --- extending from Bangor to the Virginia Capes --- will spread at a time when the work week is being shortened; as a consequence we shall be rather more sensitive to claustrophobia in these new communities, and because Americans are at heart a mobile people, we will react against this pressure by traveling even more energetically than we do today. Meanwhile, at home, service will be limited to high school girls for sitters, nurses so high-priced we can only afford them for birth and death, and grandmothers to do the extra fixings at Christmas.

It has been axiomatic in our expansion thus far that today's luxury is tomorrow's necessity. This has been made plausible by our invention which keeps reducing the price for the larger market. Assuming that invention does not fail us and that calamity does not fall, I foresee this standard equipment for the average middle-class family in the 1960s. There will be an air-conditioned house, a swimming pool if the children or grandchildren want it, and an icebox with compartments for frozen foods and game and another for tray dinners, such as we are served on the plane, for unexpected guests. Barbecue or home-cooked meals on holidays. Every family that wants it will have television: two out of five, color TV; one in ten, pay TV. The housing units will be smaller and more maneuverable, many will be supplemented with a guest cabin with bunks for the married children home on reunion. Book shelf space will be at a premium; only the odd collector, the crank, will think of buying an entire set of an author; contemporary novels and paperbacks will be discarded as strenuously as cracked records and the Sunday papers. In many a garage there will be two cars; one, the economy car, perhaps foreign-make, for commuting service; the other, an adventurous station wagon sleeping two adults with adjustable side walls forming a screened compartment for the kids. So a family will live for a time in the Yosemite, under the giant redwoods, in the Smokies, in Alaska, or in the Great Beach National Park on Cape Cod. The local garage will still keep a couple of antediluvian Cadillacs for funerals or parades.

"What the American economy needs," said Sumner Slichter recently, "is a more sophisticated consumer." It is my conviction that we shall have these sophisticated consumers in increasing number in the '60s; that their purchasing power will be highly selective and that their taste will radically affect our advertising. The pro-labor legislation of the New Deal enormously augmented the purchasing power of labor; then the subsidies to agriculture gave the farmer his turn; but the technically trained, the scientist, the research worker, the teacher, and the young professional were all left far behind. Today we are paying for that neglect; we are faced with a shortage of scientists, a shortage of good teachers, and a watering down of our whole public educational system as the Conant Report has shown. Because of this deficit and because we need them so desperately, the people who will receive the financial bonus in the coming fifteen years will be what Conant calls "the academically gifted," the 15 per cent of every graduating class; no longer a negligible minority, they will be a determinant and yeasty element in our society and their taste will make a profound difference. These college and professionally trained people who are my bread and butter today will be ten times as numerous, ten times as influential in the 1960s.

I have noticed that the higher the educational level, the more suspicious people are of excessive statements. No Harvard man ever uses a superlative. Well, hardly ever! Higher education carries with it an independence of thinking, a sharpening of the senses and a positive disgust with the banal. Those who cater to the mass markets have ignored this factor of skepticism and disgust. When I see in a periodical a full-page display of Yummy Cake Mix, blown up into a sticky cake, in living color and twice life size, and when this is followed by a full-page display of Colonel Belcher's Tomato Sauce without which one cannot eat Colonel Belcher's Sausages, in living color and twice life size, and when this is followed by a four-color beefsteak twice as handsome as what they serve at "21," I have not only lost my appetite, I have lost my belief.

Is American taste really as gullible as this? Consider for a moment the intimate probings of the cosmetics and patent medicine experts. Every night on TV we see women soaping, greasing, polishing and sandpapering themselves, hiding their false teeth in wonderful germ-killing solutions, putting their dandruff to rout, and fondling their toenails. There is one woman who gets all lathered up and then steps under the shower. What next?

I notice one strange circumstance about all these proprietary substances: each contains a unique, mysterious, absolutely new "scientific" ingredient that none of the competing companies has sense enough to imitate. It goes like this: "Blank is the only blank-blank to contain Blank!" It's true of everything from a scouring powder to a cough sirup. These ingredients (which are not to be found in the dictionary) are part of a synthetic new vocabulary for TV audiences, and those actors who talk like doctors never have any trouble pronouncing such chemical absurdities.

It would be my guess that the amount of advertising we are all exposed to today is at least double what it was ten years ago and probably five times what it was in the 1930s. This has built up a kind of immunity: people look but they do not see; they hear but they do not listen. They have learned to turn off their mental hearing aids and this definitely complicates the task of those who are trying to reach them.

An editor, like an advertising man, is always in search of new stimuli. With the antennae of his own senses he has to establish an identification, a kind of sensory intercom with his readers, and if he is an acute editor, he will expect that when a manuscript excites him it will have much the same effect on his readers. He is not infallible, but this intercom --- what I have called his antennae --- works both ways, and he learns to recognize very quickly what his people reject as well as what they accept.

The readers I serve have a loathing for ghost writers and those windy, vacuous generalizations which ghost writers propound for people who can't express themselves. Since so many American speeches today are ghost-written, my people have become very leery of speeches in print --- and I know it. Atlantic readers are nonconformist; they expect the magazine to be nonpartisan and they would walk out on me in a body if I tried to confine the magazine to one point of view. They wish to be surprised, and they look for the unpredictable.

My readers are highly conscientious about education, about race relations, most of all about the threat of nuclear weapons. A young graduate of the Harvard Medical School doing his UMT was sent out to the island of Bikini, to help protect the army-navy personnel from radiation. He did his work with a Geiger counter, but during the tropical nights when he could not sleep he filled an old college notebook with his impressions of what that bomb test really portended. When we published those pages under the title "No Place to Hide," we knew that Dr. David Bradley was talking to our people about nuclear warfare as they had never been talked to before.

Our readers are eager for American history, and I suspect that they find courage in reading about those earlier Americans who stood up to crucial decisions. Catherine Drinker Bowen performed a great service for this country when she brought readers into close touch with that "Yankee from Olympus," Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and later when she performed the same function for the crusty, rugged, right-minded young John Adams. We drew on both of those books for the Atlantic. Biography is read today with avidity and it can be serialized with less internal damage than a novel: The Years With Ross, which my associate, Charles W. Morton, induced James Thurber to write for us, was our most popular feature since the war.

My readers have small appetite for the inbred, introverted short stories published with such dreary monotony by some of my more stylish competitors. As a change of pace I induced Peter Ustinov, who had never written a short story in his life, to embark on an exclusive series for the Atlantic. Peter is one of the most entrancing and original performers on TV. I felt he would be just as original, just as refreshing in his fiction --and so he is. My people like what is poetic and genuine, and they dislike what is synthetic and tired.

"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." So wrote Emerson to William H. Channing in 1847. How will they ride us ten years from now, in 1969? Let me try a projection here. By 1980 it is estimated that the population of Red China will be 1 billion; of Soviet Russia, 340 million; of the United States, 270 million. Long before that date we shall be caught up in an economic rivalry with what we are pleased to call "slave labor," forgetting that slaves --- with or without fervor --- can outperform feather-bedded machines.

History always runs ahead of schedule. When I was a boy the Prudential Life Insurance Company used a traditional advertisement; it centered a photograph of Gibraltar, with the words "As Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar." Although the picture was of the rock, the implication was that your investment was as safe as the British Empire. When I attended the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958, I asked my friends how long they thought Belgium could hold on to the Congo. "Five years surely, perhaps ten," was the answer. But the riots of 1959 in Brazzaville show that history is running ahead of schedule. In his shocking novel 1984 George Orwell told of how the state would take young children away from their mothers the way we take eggs away from a hen. That is precisely what the Chinese communes are doing in 1959.

In the New York Times for January 28, 1959 there was an article about Soviet scientific equipment to be used in the teaching of physics in the United States. A firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has imported six thousand pieces of this apparatus from the Soviet Union which it expects to sell to our colleges at prices one-half to two-thirds less than the comparable items made in the United States, and this in spite of a 40 per cent import duty. This was a case where the Soviet economy, by its decision to place this educational equipment in mass consumption, has startled our complacency.

A news film has given us a brief glimpse of the new diamond field coming into production in Russia, and it is ironic to speculate on what would happen if the Russians chose to flood the market with diamonds only a little more expensive than rhinestones. Think what a blow this would be to the mobster members of the Apalachin Club!

Seriously, I do not think we can assume that our economy will be unaffected by the economic competition with the Soviets. Stalin predicted and lived with the hope that the United States would suffer a disastrous collapse as we emerged from the Second World War. But by his repeated, belligerent pressure upon us he made it unlikely that any such thing would occur: the aid to Greece and Turkey, the Berlin lift, the aggression in Korea kept our heavy industries fully employed producing armament. Khrushchev could be more subtle: he could keep the heat on while tempting us with talk of disarmament and at the same time making strenuous efforts to undersell us in the world markets. We will never cut back our expenditure for weapons until the Russians have agreed to a trustworthy system of inspection. But if that day comes, it will be a happy time for their economy and ours. It would mean for us that national taxes could be cut, releasing for local use --for schools, hospitals and recreation --- money which today simply is not available.

I have no doubt that by the mid-1960s the production of steel and steaks and cars, of milk and cosmetics and alcohol will have grown to meet the demands of our expanding population. But in view of the need for the minerals and oil beyond our borders, I foresee that we shall have to struggle to retain our share of the world trade in the developing nations of Asia and Africa, and of our friends in Europe; we shall have to forego the present arbitrary, costly, often futile contests between labor and management, and work with a strenuousness which we once knew but have forgotten in the process of growing fat. We shall be faced with a standard of competition as opposed to a standard of living quite different from what it is today. If this coming test results in a new austerity, or as we may prefer to call it a new "simplicity," this could be a healthy thing.

Taste is just as strongly evinced by the things people do as it is by the things they possess. Perhaps it is my long exposure to the New England climate and the New England character which makes me feel that the return to a more austere life, to a life which demands certain sacrifices for the public good, would be far healthier than the present mood of quick money and selfish indulgence. I have spoken of the inundation of our suburban areas and of the claustrophobia which comes from the ever-present pressure of neighbors. But there is another side to this and a good side. In these quick-forming communities there is a blinding and cohesive strength which comes to us all when we do things voluntarily with others. Parent-teacher associations; community theatricals; the support of a local half-amateur symphony orchestra; the singing of Negro and white choruses in a community center; the work which goes into the preservation of historical America, whether it be Sturbridge, Massachusetts, or Shelburne, Vermont, or Beacon Hill; the groups which meet to discuss the Great Books; the groups intent on foreign affairs; the parents, the doctors, and the judges who have been aroused by the alarming increase in criminality; the parents whose children have become emotionally disturbed; the missionaries who meet under the slogan "Alcoholics Anonymous"; the citizen's committees which are working to reduce racial tension; the bird watchers, the photographers, and those who are struggling to preserve our shade trees and our community gardens --- surely these people in their responsible vigilant concerns are just as much the taste-makers of America as those who own the finest collections of the French impressionists. We used to think that poverty was responsible for our juvenile delinquency, but we now find to our amazement that during the past decade of our prosperity the crime wave, especially among the adolescents and twenty-year-olders, has broken all records. The American conscience is rising to meet this domestic emergency.

Taste is evinced by the things we do. And do I dare suggest that in the years to come the more responsible advertisers will try to reach and influence the more responsible Americans? Yes, I do. After years of puzzling out the meaning of Walter Paepke's advertisements for Container Corporation I really think that something like this, but more compelling, might be possible. Those who served on the Advertising Council during the war years will never forget the thrill that came to them when they discovered that they were, gradually and visibly, persuading the American people to accept meatless days and war rationing. To guide people's thinking in the right direction is not only good taste, it is good leadership.

Back in 1910 there were 7 million common laborers in this country; in October 1958 they had dropped to 5 million, whereas the number of professional workers has risen from 1-3/4 million in 1910 to 7 million in 1958. In the years ahead the increase in these professionally trained Americans --- the increase in their college children and the increase in their purchasing power --- will be astronomical. It had better be, for they are our best hope.

In the tense and dangerous competition that lies ahead, let us never forget that what really stimulates the American economy are decent, educated people. This is something we are always in danger of forgetting.

MY LATE friend, the French writer Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who knew America intimately, used to tease me about our infatuation with bigness. "It's in your blood," he would say. "When I listen to Americans talking on shipboard, or in a Paris restaurant, or here in New York, it is only a question of time before someone will come out with that favorite boast of yours ---'the biggest in the world!' The New York skyline, or the Washington Monument, or the Chicago Merchandise Mart --- the biggest in the world. You say it without thinking what it means." How right he was, yet until he prodded me about it, I had never realized that this was indeed our national boast. We take pride in being big, and in a youthful way we used to think that bigness was our own special prerogative. But now we know better; now we find ourselves confronted with nations or with groups of nations which are quite as big as we are and which have the potential of being considerably bigger. This calls for a new orientation; indeed, I think it might be timely if we examine this concept of bigness and try to determine how it has affected our private lives and our thinking.

We have been in love with bigness ever since the adolescence of our democracy. The courtship began on the frontier: the uncut virgin forests, so dense and terrifying; the untamed flooding rivers; the limitless prairies; the almost impassable Sierras ---to overcome obstacles like these, man, so puny in comparison, had to outdo himself. He had to be bigger than Hercules. The English live on a small, contained island, and English humor is naturally based on understatement; but an American when he is having fun always exaggerates.

Our first hero of the frontier was a superman, Davy Crockett, who could outshoot, outfight, and outwoo anyone. One day he sauntered into the forest for an airing but forgot to take his thunderbolt along. This made it embarrassing when he came face to face with a panther. The scene is described in the old almanac, as Howard Mumford Jones says, "in metaphoric language which has all the freshness of dawn." The panther growled and Crockett growled right back --- "He grated thunder with his teeth" --- and so the battle began. In the end, the panther, tamed, goes home with Davy, lights the fire on a dark night with flashes from his eyes, brushes the hearth every morning with his tail, and rakes the garden with his claws. Davy did the impossible, and listening to the legends of his prowess made it easier for the little guy on the frontier to do the possible.

Davy Crockett had a blood brother in Mike Fink, the giant of the river boatmen, and first cousins in Tony Beaver and Paul Bunyan of the North Woods and Pecos Bill of the Southwest. They were ring-tailed roarers, and everything they did had an air of gigantic plausibility. Prunes are a necessary part of the lumberjack's diet, and Paul Bunyan's camp had such a zest for prunes that the prune trains which hauled the fruit came in with two engines, one before and one behind pushing. "Paul used to have twenty flunkies sweepin' the prunestones out from under the tables, but even then they'd get so thick we had to wade through 'em up over our shoes sometimes on our way in to dinner. They'd be all over the floor and in behind the stove and piled up against the windows where they'd dumped 'em outside so the cook couldn't see out at all hardly . . . . In Paul's camp back there in Wisconsin the prunestones used to get so thick they had to have twenty ox-teams haulin' 'em away, and they hauled 'em out in the woods, and the chipmunks ate 'em and grew so big the people shot 'em for tigers." Only an American could have invented that buildup, and I am grateful to Esther Shephard for having recaptured the legend so accurately in her Paul Bunyan.

Texas, with its fondness for bigness, preferred the living man to the legend: it provided the space for men like Richard King, the founder of the King Ranch. Richard King's story as told by Tom Lea is Horatio Alger multiplied by a thousand. The son of Irish immigrants, he ran off to sea at the age of eleven; a riverboat captain in his twenties, he came ashore, married the parson's daughter, bought 15,000 acres of prairie at two cents an acre, and went into the cattle business. His close friend and adviser was Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the Second United States Cavalry, and it was Lee who gave King what has come to be the family slogan: "Buy land; and never sell." The King Ranch has grown to 700,000 acres in Texas with big offshoots in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Australia, Cuba, and Brazil, and those of us who dwell in cities and suburbia have developed a kind of Mount Vernon reverence for this vast domain. It is just about as big, we think, as a good ranch ought to be.

As I look back over the thirty-five years of my working life, I recognize that a significant change has taken place in our business community. The motorcars which I used to covet as a young bachelor, the Stutz Bearcat, the Mercer, the Simplex, the Locomobile, the Pierce Arrow --- all these beauties and hundreds of the lesser breeds, like the Hupmobile, the Maxwell, the Franklin, the Stanley Steamer, and the Moon --- are museum pieces today. The beauty and the originality which went into their design have been melted down and vulgarized in the models of the five major companies which survive.

In the days I am speaking of, Mr. Potts was our family grocer, and he knew the exact cuts of roast beef and lamb which would bring joy to my father's heart, just as he was prepared for my mother's remonstrance when there was too much gristle. There used to be a family grocer, like Mr. Potts, in every American community. Then some genius in Memphis, Tennessee, came up with the Piggly-Wiggly, the first gigantic cash and carry where the customer waited on himself, and in no time there were chains of these supermarkets stretching across the country. Such consolidation as this has been going on in every aspect of business, and at a faster and faster tempo.

When I was a book salesman, an American book publisher who sold a million dollars' worth of his books in one year was doing quite a prosperous business. Today a publisher who sells only a million dollars' worth of books a year cannot afford to remain in business; he has to join forces with another and larger publisher so that their combined production will carry them over the break-even point.

In the 1920s almost every American city had two newspapers, and the larger ones had four or five, and there is no doubt that this competition for ideas, for stories, for the truth was a healthy thing for the community. Today most American communities are being served by a single paper.

Of the daily papers that were being published in this country in 1929, 45 per cent have either perished or been consolidated. This consolidation, this process of making big ones out of little ones, is a remorseless thing and it may be a harmful thing if it tends to regiment our thinking.

We Americans have a remarkable capacity for ambivalence. On the one hand we like to enjoy the benefits of mass production, and on the other we like to assert our individual taste. Ever since the Civil War we have been exercising our genius to build larger and larger combines. Experience has taught us that when these consolidations grow to the size of a giant octopus, we have got to find someone to regulate them. When our railroads achieved almost insufferable power, we devised the Interstate Commerce Commission, and we eventually found in Joseph Eastman a regulator of impeccable integrity who knew as much as any railroad president. We have not had such good luck with our other regulatory agencies, as the recent ignoble record of the FCC makes clear. What troubles me even more than the pliancy of FCC commissioners to political pressure is their willingness to favor the pyramiding under a single ownership of television channels, radio stations, morning and evening newspapers. Isn't this the very monopoly they were supposed to prevent?

The empire builders, who were well on their way to a plutocracy, were brought within bounds by the first Roosevelt. Then under the second Roosevelt it was labor's turn, and in their bid for power they have confronted Washington with the challenge of what regulations can be devised which will bring them to a clearer recognition of their national responsibility. In the not far future we can see another huge decision looming up: When atomic energy is harnessed for industrial use, will it be in the hands of a few private corporations or in a consolidation which the government will control? My point is that in the daily exposure to such bigness the individual is made to feel smaller than he used to be, smaller and more helpless than his father and grandfather before him.

I realize, of course, that twice in this century our capacity to arm on an enormous scale has carried us to victory with a speed which neither the Kaiser nor Hitler believed possible. But it is my anxiety that, in a cold war which may last for decades, the maintenance of bigness which is necessary to cope with the U.S.S.R. may regiment the American spirit.

In his book Reflections on America, Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, draws a sharp distinction "between the spirit of the American people and the logic of the superimposed structure of ritual of civilization." He speaks of "the state of tension, of hidden conflict, between this spirit of the people and this logic of the structure; the steady, latent rebellion of the spirit of the people against the logic of the structure." Maritain believes that the spirit of the American people is gradually overcoming and breaking the logic of their materialistic civilization. I should like to share his optimism, but first we have some questions to answer, questions about what the pressure of bigness is doing to American integrity and to American taste.

Henry Wallace called this the Century of the Common Man. Well, the longer I live in it the more I wonder whether we are producing the Uncommon Man in sufficient quantity. No such doubts were entertained a century ago. When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous address on "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard in 1837, he was in a mood of exhilaration, not doubt, and he heralded among other things a change which had taken place in American literature. It was a change in the choice of subject matter; it was a change in approach, and it showed that we had thrown off the leading strings of Europe. Here is how he described it:

The elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized . . . . The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign --- is it not? ---of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. . .

This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.

This change from the appreciation of the elite to the appreciation of the commonplace, or as Emerson called it, the vulgar, has been increasingly magnified under the pressure of numbers. But were Emerson able to return to us for a short visit, I am not sure that he would be altogether happy about what we have done to elevate the vulgar in literature or in television.

In contemporary literature, new books --- the best we can produce --- are still published in hard covers and sold to a discriminating body of readers. If I had to guess, I should say that there are about one million discriminating readers in this country today, and what disturbs me as an editor is that this number has not increased with the population; it has not increased appreciably since the year 1920. What has increased is the public for comic books, for murder mysteries, for sex and sadism. This debasement, especially in fiction, was most noticeable in the early stages of our paperbacks, when the racks in any drugstore were crowded with lurid, large-bosomed beauties who were being either tortured or pursued. Recently there has been an improvement, both in quantity and in seriousness, thanks to the editors of Anchor Books and the New American Library, thanks also to a feeling of outrage which was expressed in many communities. But it still seems to me regrettable that after a hundred years of public education we have produced such a demand for the lowest common denominator of emotionalism.

Am I, I sometimes wonder, a minority of one when I shudder at certain photographs in our pictorial magazines --- the picture of a Negro being lynched; the picture of an airliner which has crashed and burned, with that naked body to the left identified as an opera singer whose voice we have all heard and loved; the picture of a grieving mother whose child has just been crushed in an automobile accident? Am I a minority of one in thinking that these are invasions of privacy, indecent and so shocking that we cringe from the sight?

Television, for which we once had such high hope, is constantly betrayed by the same temptation. It can rise magnificently to the occasion, as when it brought home to us the tragedy in Hungary, yet time and again its sponsored programs sink to a sodden level of brutality, shooting, and torture. And is there any other country in the world which would suffer through such incredible singing commercials as are flung at us? Does the language always have to be butchered for popular appeal? Am I a minority of one in thinking that the giveaway programs, by capitalizing on ignorance, poverty, and grief, are a disgrace? These are deliberate efforts to reduce a valuable medium to the level of the bobby-soxers.

There was a time when the American automobiles led the world in their beauty, diversity, and power, but the gaudy gondolas of today are an insult to the intelligence. In an era of close crowding when parking is an insoluble problem, it was sheer arrogance on the part of the Detroit designers to produce a car which was longer than the normal garage, so wasteful of gasoline, so laden with useless chromium and fantails that it costs a small fortune to have a rear fender repaired. I saw in a little Volkswagen not long ago a sign in the windshield reading "HELP STAMP OUT CADILLACS!" There speaks the good-natured but stubborn resistance of the American spirit against the arrogance of Detroit.

Is it inevitable in mass production that when you cater to the many, something has to give, and what gives is quality? I wonder if this has to be. I wonder if the great majority of the American people do not have more taste than they are credited with. The phenomenal increase in the sale of classical music recordings the moment they became available at mass production prices tells me that Americans will support higher standards when they are given the chance. I stress the aberration of taste in our time because I think it is something that does not have to be. The republic deserves better standards, not only for the elect, but straight across the board.

I wish that our directors in Hollywood, the heads of our great networks, and those who, like the automobile designers in Detroit, are dependent upon American taste --- I wish that such arbiters would remember what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a hundred and twenty-five years ago in his great book, Democracy in America. "When the conditions of society are becoming more equal," said Tocqueville, "and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind."

It seems to me that our taste-makers have been guilty of this fallacy ever since the close of World War II. They have ceased to notice the citizens and consider only the people, just as Tocqueville warned. They no longer plan for the differences in individual taste, but think only of people in the mass.

In the years that followed the crash of 1929, Americans began to transfer their trust from big business to big government; if big business and banking, so ran the reasoning, could not be depended on to keep us out of depressions, perhaps big government could. Gradually in this emergency we began to shape up our version of the welfare state, a concept which was evolving in many parts of the Western world and to which both Democrats and Republicans are now committed.

A welfare state requires a big government with many bureaus, just as big government in its turn requires big taxes. We embarked on big government with the idea of safeguarding those segments of American society which were most in jeopardy, and now after twenty-five years of experimentation we are beginning to learn that the effects of big government upon the individual are both good and bad. It is good to provide the individual with security, and to give him the chance to adjust his special claims; another and perhaps unsuspected asset has been dramatized by Edwin O'Connor in his novel The Last Hurrah, in which he showed us how President Roosevelt had diminished and destroyed the sovereignty of the city boss. It is Washington, not Ward 8, that has the big patronage to give today.

The maleffects of big government are more subtle. Consider, for instance, the debilitating effect of heavy taxation. I remember a revealing talk I had with Samuel Zemurray when he was president of the United Fruit Company. Born in Russia, Zemurray made his start here by pushing a fruit cart through the streets of Gadsden, Alabama. Then he set up his own business as a banana jobber by selling the bunches of bananas the fruit company didn't want. He sold out to United Fruit and continued to acquire shares until he controlled the majority of the stock. In the autumn of F.D.R.'s second term, when we were sitting in adjoining Pullman seats on the long run to Washington, Mr. Zemurray began talking about the President's promises to "the forgotten man." "He made three promises," Zemurray said, "and he has kept two of them: the promise to labor and that to the farmer. The promise he has not kept is to the little businessman. Under today's taxes it would be quite impossible for a young man to do as I did --- he would never be able to accumulate enough capital."

Some years after this talk, in 1946 to be exact, I was on a plane flying West from Chicago. It was a Sunday morning and the man who sat beside me at the window seat had the big bulk of the Chicago Tribune spread open on his knees, but out of politeness's sake he gave me the proverbial greeting, "Well, where are you from?" And when I said, "From Boston," his face lit up. "Do they still have good food at the Automat?" he asked. "Boy, that's where I got my start and it certainly seems a lifetime ago." And then in a rush out poured his life story in one of those sudden confidences with which Americans turn to one another: how he had become a salesman of bedroom crockery, and how his Boston boss had refused to raise him to thirty dollars a week. In his anger he had switched to the rival company, and under their encouragement he had simply plastered Cape Cod with white washbowls, pitchers, soap dishes, and tooth mugs. "Seven carloads I sold in the first year," he told me. The company called him back to its head office in Chicago, and then came the crash. The company owned a bank and lake-shore real estate, and when the smoke had cleared away and recovery was possible, he found himself running the whole shebang. His wife hadn't been able to keep up with it all, he said, shaking his head sadly. He had had his first coronary, and what kept him alive today was his hope for his two sons, who had just come out of the Navy. "But, you know," he said to me, his eyes widening, "they neither of them want to come in with me. They don't seem to want to take the chances that I took. They want to tie up with a big corporation. I just don't get it."

Security for the greatest number is a modern shibboleth, but somebody still has to set the pace and take the risk. And if we gain security, but sacrifice first venture and then initiative, we may find, as the Labor Party in England did, that we end with all too little incentive. As I travel this country since the war, I have the repeated impression that fewer and fewer young men are venturing into business on their own. More and more of them seek the safety of the big corporations. There are compelling reasons for this, the ever-shrinking margin of operating profit being the most insistent. But if we keep on trading independence and initiative for security, I wonder what kind of American enterprise will be left fifty years from now.

A subtle conditioning of the voter has been taking place during the steady buildup of big government. During the depression and recovery we took our directives from Washington almost without question; so too during the war, when we were dedicated to a single purpose and when the leadership in Washington in every department was the best the nation could supply. And for almost twenty years local authority and the ability to test our political initiative in the home county and state has dwindled. About the only common rally which is left to us is the annual drive for the Community Fund. Too few of our ablest young men will stand for local office. Their jobs come first, and they console themselves with the thought that if they succeed they may be called to Washington in maturity. We used to have a spontaneous capacity for rallying; we could be inflamed, and our boiling point was low. Our present state of lethargy, our tendency to let George do it in Washington, is not only regrettable, it is bad for our system.

I remember one of the last talks I had with Wendell Willkie. He was still showing the exhaustion of defeat, and he spoke with concern as he said, "One of the weaknesses in our democracy is our tendency to delegate. During an election year we will work our hearts out, and then when the returns are in, we think we have done our part. For the next three years what happens to the party is the responsibility of the national committeemen. Have you ever looked at them?"

The decision having been made to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Truman tells us that he retired and slept soundly. But those in authority in these days are less sure. The delegation of so much authority to those in Washington and the difficulties of dealing with an opponent so ruthless and enigmatic as Russia seem to have developed in our most responsible officials a secretiveness and an uncertainty which make it hard for the citizen to follow. The administration has practiced a policy of nondisclosure toward the press and the electorate which has left the average citizen in a state of constant doubt. It was inexcusable not to have warned the American people that the sputniks were coming and that greater exertions must be expected of us. This is no time for remoteness or for lulling slogans or for the avoidance of hard truths. The volume of material, the thousands of articles dealing with the great issues of today which are pouring into my office from unknown, unestablished writers, testify to the conscientiousness and the courage of American thinking. The pity of it is that our people have not been taken more fully into the confidence of their own government.

I have said that the concept of bigness has been an American ideal since our earliest times. I pointed to our propensity to build larger and larger combines ever since the Civil War, and how the process of consolidation has speeded up during the past thirty-five years. I have suggested that we cannot enjoy the fruits of mass production without suffering the effects of regimentation.

And I ask that we look closely at what the pressure of bigness has done to American taste and opinion. Is the individual beginning to lose self-confidence and his independence? In short, how big is one?

Surely, in an atomic age self-reliance and self-restraint are needed as they have never been before. See with what force Van Wyck Brooks expresses this truth in his Writer's Notebook:

Unless humanity is intrinsically decent, heaven help the world indeed, for more and more we are going to see man naked. There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few. The time is coming when there will be nothing to restrain men except what they find in their own bosoms; and what hope is there for us then unless it is true that, freed from fear, men are naturally predisposed to be upright and just?

As we look about us, what evidence can we find that in an atmosphere overshadowed by Russia and made murky by the distrust of McCarthyism there are citizens who still stand forth, upright and ready to speak the hard truth for the public good? How big is one?

One is as big as George F. Kennan, who believes that we cannot continue to live in this state of frozen belligerency in Europe. We do not have to accept all of his proposals before applauding his thoughtful, audacious effort to break up the ice.

One is as big as Omer Carmichael, the superintendent of schools in Louisville, Kentucky, who led the movement for voluntary integration in his border state; as big as Harry Ashmore, the editor of the Little Rock Gazette, for his fearless and reasonable coverage of the Faubus scandal.

One is as big as Frank Laubach, who believes in teaching the underdeveloped nations how to read their own languages, and then in supplying them with reading matter which will aid them to develop their farming and health.

One is as big as Linus Pauling, Harold C. Urey, Robert Oppenheimer, and the other editors and sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who have never underestimated Russian scientific capacities, who have always believed in the peaceful value of scientific exchange and never ceased to struggle against fanaticism in secrecy and security.

One is as big as Edith Hamilton, the classicist, the lover of Greece and of moderation; and as Alice Hamilton, her younger sister, who pioneered in the dangerous field of industrial medicine.

One is as big as Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, who for years have been guiding lights in the resistant field of juvenile delinquency.

One is as big as Ralph Bunche and Eleanor Roosevelt.

One is as big as Louis M. Lyons, whose interpretation of the news and whose judgment of the popular press have provided, in the words of the Lauterbach Award, "a conscience for a whole profession."

One is as big as I. I. Rabi, a brilliant scientist and a passionate humanist, who, on being asked how long it would take us to catch up to Russia and to safeguard our long-range future, replied: "A generation. You know how long it takes to change a cultural pattern. The growing general awareness of this need will help us, but nevertheless we will have to work hard to succeed in a generation."

One is as big as Frederick May Eliot, president for twenty-one years of the American Unitarian Association, who worked himself to the bone for the deepening of faith and for reconciliation.

One is as big as you yourself can make it.

WHEN I became the ninth editor of the Atlantic in June of 1938, a dinner was given in my honor at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. Present were a number of our distinguished New England contributors, including Robert Frost (who was later to read aloud a new poem provided I'd accept it "sight unseen"), such dear rivals as Fred Allen of Harper's, and my two immediate predecessors, Bliss Perry and Ellery Sedgwick. As I entered the cocktail reception, I heard Bliss Perry remark: "Here comes the next victim," and I remember his saying to me during the dinner --- he sat on my right --- "There are really only two rules of editing I can give you. The first: pay your contributors on acceptance --- the money will never look bigger. The second is more personal: remember how vulnerable we all are to fatigue and indigestion; when you feel bilious, try to postpone to the next day your troublesome decisions." Well, I was forty and full of cocktails at the time and the possibility that I should ever be a weary or dyspeptic editor seemed remote. I felt that the buoyancy of that evening would last me as long as I could see to read.

Early in my editorship I learned that editors work on a weekend to weekend basis. During the week they dictate letters; they talk on the telephone, and to those pregnant with manuscripts; and they attend what are called Conferences --- the surest device for killing time known to industry. I learned that an editor's work week really begins on Friday afternoon when with his secretary's help he stuffs his briefcase with all the things he ought to have attended to during the week. Beginning Friday night and continuing through Sunday he reads his prizes and makes his discoveries, blueprints the next issue, and dreams up his big ideas for the future in that ancient Indian posture of sitting and contemplating his navel. No editor worth his salt can live without a minimum of contemplation and privacy.

By Monday morning he is at his peak: he has caught up with his reading; he feels confident of his decisions and eager to explore the new leads which came to him while he was not listening to the sermon Sunday morning. This will be one of those rare days when he has the world in his hand, when writers and agents say "Yes" and when the telephone is like a voice from Heaven. "Get me Senator X in Washington," he says to his secretary, "and after that I want to speak to Harold Ober, the literary agent." Then he begins leafing through the morning mail.

The Quill Club of Terre Haute will appreciate it if he will serve as one of three judges of its annual short story contest. Not more than seventy manuscripts are expected, and they hope he can complete his rating by October 1. The Harvard Dames would like him to speak on a literary subject any Thursday evening in November. Unfortunately their budget is a modest one and they can offer no fee greater than their appreciation. That nice, if persistent, couple he met at Breadloaf has a daughter, fresh from Smith, who wants an editorial job. She has typing but has purposely not learned shorthand since it might tie her down. A reader in Kentucky wishes to point out that the word "thoroughbred" can only be applied to a horse with a pedigree. The Atlantic contributor who wrote that his heroine "had the look of a high-spirited thoroughbred" was not paying the lady the compliment he intended and never mind what Webster says about it. "Would you like to read my series on the Orient?" asks a hand-written card. "Seven articles averaging 9000 words. Will come in for an appointment." The query is not inscribed on a regular postcard, no, it is written in the white margins of the get-acquainted, cut-price subscription reply card which we so thoughtfully insert in our newsstand copies. No postage necessary.

You will see that I have discarded my disguise, and that the editor I am talking about is myself. No Monday mail is complete without a letter from a contributor who objects to the way we have edited his copy. The one before me comes from Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. I had asked Chandler to do a piece for us on Oscar night. He did it, and it was a beauty: full of the most penetrating little daggers. The trouble was, our Boston proofreaders were not familiar with Chandler's style, and when he described the crowd in the free seats "giving out" that awful moaning sound, they simply deleted the preposition. I had also changed the title to "Oscar Night in Hollywood." Mr. Chandler, having read his galleys, is now in a slow burn:

Dear Mr. Weeks:

I'm afraid you've thrown me for a loss. I thought Juju Worship in Hollywood was a perfectly good title. But you're the boss. I've thought of various other titles such as Bank Night in Hollywood, Sutter's Last Stand, The Golden Peepshow, All it Needs is Elephants, The Hot Shot Handicap, Where Vaudeville Went When it Died, and rot like that. But nothing that smacks you in the kisser.

By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I got both sidewalks and the street between.

Kindest regards,

RAY CHANDLER

(To be tossed and gored by a contributor can be a good thing; individuality is the spice of life.)

Now I've about reached the end of my Monday mail. My secretary has a way of saving the letters of abuse till the last and here they are. There is an anonymous postcard reviling us for publishing a respectful article on Russian education and calling me "The Red Brahmin of Beacon Hill." And what are these, these multigraphed letters on paper of gray burlap? They are all identical and there must be more than a hundred. Slowly the meaning becomes clear. In our Washington Report we had referred to "the organized Polish minority" which might affect the elections in Michigan. Before me is a Polish demonstration. "Dear Sir: I the undersigned wish to deny indignantly the accusation in the September Atlantic, page 39, that there is an organized Polish minority in the United States . . ." One hundred and thirty-nine of them by actual count.

All this time of eager assimilation the phone has been ringing, a conference with the Advertising Department has been set for 11; it is now 10:30; Senator X in Washington has not returned my call, and how many pinpricks do you need to deflate a balloon?

I sometimes wonder why we do it, and of course the truth is we couldn't be paid to do anything else. Editing is in our blood and all this attrition I have been talking about is simply the gristle in our meat. We edit because, God help us, we think it is important. If we were committed to Bedlam we would edit a handwritten sheet for our fellow inmates, and if Russia took over this country, we would edit underground. We think we were born to do this and we believe that what we are doing is in the public good.

At rare intervals we are confirmed in this belief. There are turning points in the career of every magazine and those editors who made the turn will never forget it. Sometimes you see the high point a long way ahead, as we did in Boston when for eighteen months we built up the big issues which signalized our Centennial in the autumn of 1957. That November issue, on our birthday, was our dream book; it sold out on the Eastern seaboard in 36 hours, and for the only time in our history we went back on press. We are a spontaneous people and quick to recognize a warning. In 1934 De Witt Wallace had a fateful conversation with a garageman in Armonk Village, New York. The mechanic asked him if he had any idea of the murder that was being committed on our highways every day. Wallace went home and brooded; then got in touch with J. C. Furnas who was told to spare no detail in arousing Americans to the horror of wild driving. I don't know how many times the article was rewritten; I do know that "And Sudden Death" permanently changed the character of The Reader's Digest and that 4 million reprints were requested in the three months after publication.

Think of the audacity of Harold Ross in sending John Hersey to Hiroshima and of then devoting an entire issue of the New Yorker to his findings with no space reserved even for the advertisements. McCarthy was at the height of his intimidation when Max Ascoli had the courage to attack the China Lobby in two resounding articles in the Reporter. Think of the urgency of Norman Cousins in flying over to Lambaréné to persuade Dr. Schweitzer to speak out against the insanity of nuclear warfare. Think of the foresight of the editors of Look, particularly Dan Mich, when in 1956 they correctly forecast the Southern resistance to integration and went out to meet it in their lead article, "The South vs. The Supreme Court." Fred Allen of Harper's twice led the whole field with his exposure of the infuriating corruption in labor relations: first in 1948 in the blazing article, "The Blast in Centralia, No. 5," and four years later with Mary Heaton Vorse's unsparing account of the longshoremen and how those pirates were holding up the Port of New York. Again when Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer was being demoted as a security risk, I like to remember that within a month three magazines, mine among them, sprang to his defense. This is the courage, this is the vigilance which the country expects of magazine editors.

The danger for us all is that we think too exclusively in terms of leading articles, newsstand sales and advertising revenue and far too little about our allies. We have bet our lives on the currency of the printed word, yet it doesn't seem to trouble us that reading --- the habit and delight of reading --- could be steadily diminished under the pressure of new competition. We have a powerfully hypnotic rival in television and there is no question whatever that television has seriously cut into the time once given to reading. In every college community we have a heavy competition in the long-playing record; undergraduates today spend as much money collecting records as they do collecting books. In this rivalry for attention we badly need the help of English teachers and librarians. They, too, are dedicated to the printed word and they tap the enthusiasm of the young, yet we hardly give them the time of day. What can we do? What awards could we give to show our appreciation of librarians and teachers and of all they do to make books and magazines desirable?

Why have we neglected radio, and why has radio neglected us? Not since the death of Alec Woollcott have we heard a nationwide voice exciting people to read. "I have been going quietly mad," he would say, "over a new book called Lost Horizon" and the next day literally thousands went out to find that volume. Why not again? As for the booksellers and magazine distributors, not till the well-merited failure of the American News Company as a wholesaler did we ever worry our pretty heads about them. Evidently we are dangerously self-centered.

The summer of 1958 it occurred to me to thank the management of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for their loyalty in advertising in the Atlantic uninterruptedly for fifty years. In his reply, Vice President Sanford B. Cousins wrote: "The Atlantic was one of the 52 magazines to carry our national advertising when it first appeared in 1908. Of them only 8 have survived the ravages of whatever diseases magazines suffer." Eight survivors out of fifty-two. The old Life must have been one of the casualties and the reason why the new Life is such a powerhouse is the decision, the turning point their editors took some years back, when they determined that pictures simply were not enough: they had to have prose too. Significant that they made their pitch in history --- the history of art, of culture, a retelling with pictures of The Outline of History which appealed as nothing else could have done so surely to the American zeal for self-improvement. There is a clearly discernible trend here. The success of American Heritage is in direct response to the rising interest in history which has swept through the nation since the Second World War. Now that we have become the leader of the West, people want to catch up with the past; what can we learn from studying our earlier crises? No one but ourselves can pull us out of the next. So too in science. The transformation of Scientific American under the lead of Gerard Piel from a journal of technology to a magazine with a broad approach to physics, biology and scientific research paid off long before sputnik. And when those two bellwethers, the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, discard fiction as their cover appeal and instead play up biography and adventures of the mind, you may be sure that a major change in American taste has occurred.

It is my guess that this swing to the serious will be accelerated and naturally I like this, for it means a greater opportunity for my magazine. So it does for others. The eager developing interest in the thoughtful, the scientific, the how-to-do-it material is traceable to what the census calls "professional and technical workers." In number they have been rapidly increasing; so has their purchasing power, so have their children in college. In the census age group of "65 and over" only 3-1/2 per cent have a college degree, whereas in the age group ready for college today, white and colored, 17 per cent or five times as many are taking degrees. In the next decade that number will increase astronomically.

All editors have had to do with the young graduate and his college wife; we know their desire to have four or five children where we had two; their capability for doing things for themselves; the intentness they bring to their reading, their music, their homes, their travel and their use of leisure. This is the coming and dominant readership. Can you reach them and hold their loyalty? Certainly: not by talking down but by editing up.