This is good as far as
it goes, but does not go far. The scholars must serve us
themselves--and are too often incapable.
Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty
of finding these intellectualized old Americans who have drifted
away from the old magazines and are being painfully collected in
driblets by the weeklies and the reviews. They do not,
unfortunately for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris.
They are scattered in towns, cities, university communities,
lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably that
intellectualized public upon which all good magazines as well as
all good reviews must depend, has not yet become so stratified and
homogeneous after the upheavals of our generation that a
commercial success of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it
can and must be found.
The success of _The Atlantic Monthly_ in finding a sizable and
homogeneous public through the country is interesting in just this
connection. It has, so it is generally understood, been very much a
question of _finding_--of going West after the departing New Englander
and his children, and hunting him out with the goods his soul desired.
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