Perhaps the New York Nation is respon: sible for something of this misunderstanding. No paper lismore often quoted abroad, or more generally supposed to set forth with fairness domestic problems. And yet the Nation is as little representative' of Broadly, as la the London Tires, nor la any public opinion, speaking for the country
paper more liable to lead astray its foreign renders as to the overwhelming drift of national sentiment. It is of course quite possible to retort, "So much the worse for public opinion," and yet the condemnation is not wholly just. It is true that the Nation is a periodical of which every cultivated American is proud; that it is, as the Saturd+y has observed, on the level with the best European periodicals is true, that it has led in every political reform for the last quarter of a century, and that it stands for honour and integrity in all public affairs; it is true also that its small constituency represents the best minds of the whole country, a '"constituency of critics" as it has been called. Yet. even its friends and "constant readers" are the first to admit its unrepresentative character, and to smile at its superb dogmatism and fine old crusted prejudices. It is bitterly partisan—its party being those who think as it thinks—and often pursues with an unscrupulous malevolence those with whom it disagrees. But its radical weakness is its cold-blooded and hopelessly unemotional view of all matters involving national pride or honour. Any American who took Mr. Labouchere as his guide as to British feeling on imperial questions would not be so far in error as the English reader who regains Mr. Godkin—for the Nation is Mr. Godkin as Truth is Mr. Labouchere—as an authority regarding American sentiment. Its point of view is that of dollars and cents,—ie., of the economic welfare of the country. It derisively prints honour in quotation marks, and in more than one crisis in the past has assumed an attitude wholly in keeping with such a sarcasm. As a recent sympathetic and discriminating literary critic has observed, "there is something about the Post's attitude (the Nation is the weekly edition of the Even,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.