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superficial and sentimental, and those that were really obscene, indecent, and improper. Nor should we forget that we ourselves are censors.

"We make possible, by our reading and buying, the books that are worthy to survive, and also the books that should never have been made. The principle at stake in this whole censorship matter is the principle of freedom of thought and writing. Discussion will discover the truth and debate test the issues.

"It is a time to take down our Milton from the shelf and read not once, nor twice, but many times, his immortal 'Areopagitica,' that we may learn anew the cost and the value of freedom of thought and printing, feel again the quickening of our pulses, and find once more reinforcement in our determination to be free, and the renewal of our faith in the power of truth. Parliament had passed an order to regulate printing: That no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such or at least one of such, as shall be appointed.' Milton addressed himself to them and declared:

'Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a book, kills reason itself.

Kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps, there is no great loss; and a revolution of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for want of which whole nations fare the

worse.

'We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see that a kind of homicide may thus be committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it stand to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth-essence, the breadth of reason itself; slays an immortality other than life. . . .

'Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously be licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing...

'For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, no stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those on the shifts and the defenses that Error uses against her favor; give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true..... rather turns herself into all shapes except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time .. until she be adjured into her own likeness.'"

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Manuscript Club Department

A REGULAR department which seeks to discover the value of the social group of writers as a critical guide to the work of its members.

Editor, the Writer:

You are doing good work in your Manuscript Club department. Twenty years ago, when I lived in England, I was a member of a Club whose forty members lived in various parts of the country and never met each other, yet the club was successful. Five folios (i. e., covers large enough to hold eight or nine MSS of varying sizes, also spare foolscap for criticisms) were circulated by mail among the members, each member receiving one about every two weeks. The recipients werc allowed to keep the folio for five days during which they were to read the manuscripts, criticize in writing, if they cared to, insert a new manuscript of their own, and then mail the folio to the next address on the mailing list to be found on the inside cover. If any of the member's own manuscripts were in the folio when it reached him he took them out before sending the folio to the next one cn the list.

That method worked admirably. The Club had a "head" to whom the folios were sent at stated intervals, when he would correct the mailing lists and do anything that was needed to facilitate smooth operation.

There is this to be said for "Correspondence Manuscript Clubs;" they help production. In order to live up to the conditions of membership, a member has to write something. During my membership I read a large number of stories in those folios which I afterward saw in magazines of good standing and large circulation. What surprized me more than anything was the fact that recognized authors-several had written novels, and some had volumes of poetry to their creditwere among the best members of the Club. They said that the criticism of the other members was

valuable. It was true that the most helpful criticism often came from the least successful writers.

The correspondence method which I have described has this advantage over the personal contact method; the criticisms being in writing are more helpful. The critic can take more time for his work and he has to be explicit; his words-and better yet-his judgments, are selected with greater deliberation, and the very fact of having to write them down is helpful experience.

Of course, personal contacts are apt to bring out more ideas and they may be expressed with greater emphasis, but only those who have received seven or eight manuscripts from fellow aspirants in authorship, all in one batch and each one accompanied by three or four criticisms, can know of the thrill and the stimulation of the experience. A member of such a club just has to write! And if stimulus of one's ambition is one of the essentials for a young writer I know of few better methods of getting it than that of the Manuscript Club.

There must be hundreds of tyros scattered over these United States who would be glad to join a Manuscript Club such as I have described. What about forming one? The school teacher "way back" in the mountains somewhere may be trying vainly to get started on the pathway to fame by means of writing, and longing for fellowship with kindred spirits. There is no way, other than the one I have described, to help her, and she may be the very person who some day will write the great American novel.

Your Manuscript Club department is all right. Nothing but good can come from it. Keep up the good work. Sincerely yours,

G. W. Doughty.

NOTE: THE WRITER is interested to know whether there are any "Correspondence Manuscript Clubs" in America.

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Editorial and Business Offices at 1430 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Unsolicited manuscripts, if not accompanied by stamped and addressed envelopes, will not be returned and the Editors will not enter into correspondence about them.

Entered at the Boston Postoffice as Second Class Mail Matter.

Subscription postpaid, $3.00 per year; foreign, $3.36. Advertising Rates on Request. Note to Subscribers: Notice of change of address, stating both OLD and NEW address, must be received not later than the 5th of the month. Otherwise the next issue will go to the OLD address, and subscriber should send necessary postage to his postmaster to forward to new address

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PROPOS of Mr. Augustus Thomas's remarks on copyright, (quoted on page 249,) it is interesting to recall what Thomas Macaulay said in 1841 to the English Parliament about copyright.

"The advantages arising from a system of copyright are obvious. It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we can not have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright. You can not depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of

their lives. Of these persons, few will be found among the rich and noble. The rich and the noble are not impelled to intellectual exertion by necessity. They may be impelled to intellectual exertion by the desire of distinguishing themselves, or by the desire of benefiting the community.

"It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable

books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labor. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.

"I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favor of ministers and nobles."

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A TEN-DOLLAR prize is awarded each month for the best letter published in this department.

Editor, the Forum:

METROPOLITAN VERSUS PROVINCIAL READERS

In an article in The Saturday Review of Literature, the following statement appeared:

"New York City houses the chief publishing firms in the United States, and the principal periodicals, with a few exceptions. The vast business of producing the country's literature is concentrated here as in no other city in America. Bookstores are all about us, the news of the world is digested for us daily, and weekly, and monthly, in a hundred easily procurable forms, within the grasp of the least fortunate. There is a net work of branch libraries. Even a person of modest means can keep abreast of the most important books, of the most important news. Yet though the average metropolitan reader has such a multiplicity of advantages, in the satisfaction of his desire to read, over his brethren more widely scattered throughout the country, it is extremely doubtful whether he is better educated."

There is certainly considerable doubt if the metropolitan reader is better educated than the provincial. He may have a wider knowledge of contemporary books and writing, more modern authors and book titles may be familiar to him, but he may not appreciate or

Editor, the Forum:

realize the significance of the few books that are really worth while.

Publishers' blurbs and sensational advertisements have a decided influence in obtaining readers, and in New York City readers are more subject to this influence than readers in the smaller cities and rural districts. The desire to read and the accessibility of the latest books, not only because of the proximity of publishers but also because of the numerous libraries, overshadows the advantages of acquiring a literary background by acquaintance with the great work of the past. Within the last year or two, the number of books published, the sale of books, magazines, and periodicals, has vastly increased. Reading has been immensely stimulated.

It is a splendid thing that there is such an increased interest in reading; but it is a great mistake that readers should be content to read anything that is placed on the market. Greater discrimination in the selection of reading material, a willingness to heed the warning of honest literary critics, and a tendency to read the old masters at least occasionally in order to broaden the literary background, would have a profound effect in compelling publishers to set a higher standard for the type of manuscripts they accept. G. W. Richardson.

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

NOTE TAKING

We are told that Mr. H. G. Wells has notes scattered throughout the four quarters of the globe, while on the other hand Daniel Wilbur Steele takes no notes at all. What shall the puzzled literary striver do? Is it worth while getting out of bed at two o'clock in the morning to set down in imperishable ink a bright train of ideas?

It seems to me that it is not so much a question of the value of note taking as of intelligent application. It has been my experience in early literary efforts to jot down a

large number of notes centering around a proposed article or story, as they occurred to me at different times in the course of the day. In due course I have sat down to write the proposed piece of work; have meticulously read over all my notes-and the result has been analogous to picking up a handful of the constituent parts of a jig-saw puzzle, and planking them down on a table in the expectation that they will land there in a complete and homogeneous whole.

Perhaps there are some fortunate people whose brains are capable of assimilating a

page full of haphazardly conceived ideas and instantly fitting them all in their proper places in an article, but such gifted souls must be the exception rather than the rule. In my experience, referring to notes just before and during writing leads either to blank confusion of mind, or, if by great effort of will some clarity is achieved, the resulting work has still been knobby, or awkward, or exceedingly hard to execute. And perhaps it is illustrative and pertinent here to point to the difference in the work of Mr. Wells and Mr. Steele. No one has ever been found possessed of sufficient hardihood to claim that Mr. Wells, the voluminous note-taker, is a stylist, while everyone agrees that Mr. Steele, reported to take no notes at all, is a stylist par excellence. And while agreeing that Mr. Wells has gone a long way without apparently having to worry over

Editor, the Forum:

much about style or artistic construction, it may be assumed that the common or garden writer without a towering intellect to see him through, must look well to the homogeneous arrangement of his material, or else have himself to thank for reams of rejection slips.

It would seem that the value of notes lies mainly in that the act of writing down a suddenly visioned idea draws it safely out from the hazy region of the subconsciousness, where, if not promptly hauled out like a hooked fish, it will vanish and be lost forever. But once the notes have been made, they should, if possible, be ignored entirely. It can be depended upon that they are safely pigeonholed somewhere in a cell in the grey matter, and the brain and will can be trusted to ferret them out when they are needed. Vancover, B. C. L. S. Waite.

FREE LANCE WRITERS I HAVE KNOWN

A recent advertisement of the N. W. Ayer Company, advertising counselors, bore the heading, "Out of The Background." Art work showed certain nationally advertised products thrusting themselves forth from a background of many others into the housewife's mind.

And, as I think of free-lance writers, three of them immediately come out of the background. These three are merely good writers among other equally good ones, but each has certain characteristics that make his work and name stick in the editorial memory. These three writers are John T. Bartlett, Ruel McDaniel, and King Hamilton Grayson.

Of the three, Bartlett has sold us the most material. This is because he specializes largely in financial and bank operational writing. We publish two magazines for bankers. One is the Bankers Monthly and the other is the Bankers Service Bulletin. As well as I can remember, during the last year there has not been a single month during which we have not mailed Mr. Bartlett a sizable check for contributions to one or both of these publications.

The reasons for his success with us are many and all of them are close to the heart of an editor. I am convinced that a study of this man's work and his methods will be of immeasurable help to other writers, and I am going to enumerate the points that help his material "to get across." In the order of their relative importance they follow:

1. He has our angle. That is, he writes material of interest to the bank executives for whom our magazines are edited. Never does he submit a manuscript of a general nature or one of interest to "the man in the street." He writes for our readers.

individual institutions are cited, and discussional, general material such as we can write in our office is avoided.

3. His manuscripts are well written. This means, of course, neatly typed, double-spaced, and on a grade of paper that takes soft pencil markings easily.

4. He realizes that every editor has in his possession a blue pencil and that the aforesaid blue pencil is intended to whip manuscripts into shape for the magazine's readers. Bartlett has never to my knowledge objected even to the most drastic revisions of his manuscripts. And, when an editor knows that he can work on a man's material without spending several dollars in wires, telegrams, special deliveries, and what-not to obtain permission to cross a "t" or dot an "i", he is going to give that writer preference over the one who wants to quibble about the details of editing.

5. He is always ready with prompt co-operation in re-writing an article.

6. He turns out a large volume of material ranging from feature stories to filler space material. His "stuff" is in our office when we need it.

All of the above are qualities that every freelance writer should possess if he wants to obtain the maximum of marketability for his material. This applies not only to magazines in our field but to those in every field. And Mr. Bartlett's methods can be studied to advantage by every young writer who is just beginning to succeed, and who finds the sledding a little rough.

Ruel McDaniel is another well known freelance. His work has appeared in the leading publications of practically every trade group. Then, too, he has contributed feature articles to national magazines. This man's work is characterized by an honest effort to please. His material is obtained largely through interviews and is always

2. The majority of his material is specific. Definite happenings and methods as applied to

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