EDITORIAL NOTES.
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE.— REMINISCENCES AND FORECASTS.
Four years and a half ago the first number of McClure's Magazine was published, and the price of the magazine at that time was fifteen cents a copy. There was then no magazine sold for less than twenty-five cents a copy that gave its readers the best current literature and employed the best artists for the illustration of its text. Without laying stress upon the question of price as necessary or essential, to this publication, we record this fact as of interest in the history of periodical publishing. We have a certain pride that we were the pioneers in the field of low-priced periodical literature, and it is in the interest of the truth, which has been more or less distorted in various ways, that we revive the recollection of the position of McClure's Magazine and its price at the time it was started.
Two years ago, in announcing the reduction of the price of McClure's from fifteen cents to ten cents a copy, we made the statement that there were "no contributions, literary or pictorial, suitable for a great popular monthly that were not within the reach of the publishers of McClure's Magazine at ten cents a copy." At the time these words were written there was considerable discussion in the publishing craft in regard to the future of the ten-cent magazine, and in this discussion the public took a lively interest. Our contribution to the discussion was simply an elaboration of the idea expressed in the words quoted above: that is, the realization in fact of our faith—the publication of a magazine which proved the point. Within the last two years the discussion has died out. In the case of McClure's Magazine, which was founded at the beginning of the hard times, its circulation steadily increased in those two years, in spite of the general adverse business conditions, from 75,000 to over 275,000. Within that short period we have been enabled to set up a manufacturing plant which is not surpassed by any other printing and binding establishment of its kind in the world, and our business has so extended that we require for offices and printing establishment the equivalent of an ordinary tenstory building. That we carried out the statement made as to contributions, both literary and pictorial, is proved by the appreciative friendship that has been shown the magazine by the public, the newspapers, and the advertisers.
Such facts speak louder than any theories or speculations, and show why the discussion as to the future of the ten-cent magazine has died out. There is nothing left to speculate about now.
The purpose of the founders of this magazine has been and is to bring within reach of a greater mass of readers than before enjoyed the opportunity, the fresh product of the best writers of fiction, the clear presentation of the latest and most far-reaching developments of science, the most vivid and human pictures of the great men and events of our history—in short, to give our readers from month to month a moving, living transcript of the intelligent, interesting, human endeavor of the time. We, like other men, wish to gain material success, but we want to gain it by those means which appeal to our intellectual as well as to our moral self-respect.
We are striving to make a wholesome, entertaining, stimulating magazine, and we are editing for our readers with the same sense of sympathetic responsibility as if the magazine were only intended for ourselves and our own kin.
THE MAGAZINE'S NEW CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY.
Following an instinct which we have good reason to believe is shared by all of our readers, we have had as one of our foremost interests, in editing the magazine, the inspiring history of our own country. Our series of life portraits of great Americans, for instance, is positively the first full and adequate presentation of the real features of those sterling patriots whom we all honor and revere. Miss Tarbell's papers on the early life of Lincoln gave the first, and indeed the only, full and accurate account of Lincoln's youth and early manhood that the world has had. Mr. Hamlin Garland's series of papers did somewhat the same service for the early life of Grant. Then the papers which appeared in the magazine from time to time, on specific vital episodes or incidents in recent history, written by men who were themselves participants in the events they related, have brought to general knowledge facts and proceedings of the highest interest, that, but for these papers, might have gone forever unrecorded. We have sought, wherever there still survived a man whose own life has been a significant chapter in the history of the country, to have him tell the world his story in the pages of the magazine. Autobiographic history, in addition to being the most entertaining to read, is perhaps the most valuable. It is the one kind that is infallibly vivifying; it gives us the fact, hot and direct, from the hand of the one man capable of delivering it. In matter of this kind, by far our most important and interesting publication is one that is to begin in the next (November) number; namely,
C. A. DANA'S REMINISCENCES OF MEN AND EVENTS OF THE WAR.
Mr. Dana is one of the few men now living who was intimately associated with the important personages and events of the Civil War. Publishers and war students have long demanded from him his reminiscences of this period, and particularly his matured judgment on the three greatest actors in the struggle, Lincoln, Stanton, and Grant. But it is not until now that he has consented to give any one this important contribution to history.
The value and variety of Mr. Dana's memoirs are apparent when we consider that he was one of the first men called to a confidential position in the War Department by Edwin M. Stanton, and that he from first to last had the entire confidence of the great War Secretary. This confidence led to his appointment to many private missions, and it was his reports which influenced the action of the government at many critical periods. It was his full, unprejudiced account of Rosecrans's administration at Chattanooga, after the disaster of Chickamauga, which led
