While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly to accept the lion’s share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W.  Burrows of Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon the country.

Demos is a good fellow—­when he behaves himself, and that generally means when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.

* * * * *

Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from another.  A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation of a friend, writes: 

    “I am told it is the best gentleman’s magazine in the United
    States.”

Now, somehow, “gentleman” is a word that we are very chary of using.  We couldn’t put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it—­and that we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that it was just what we were after—­that it includes, or ought to include, about everything that we are trying to accomplish.  In any interpretation, it is certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.

* * * * *

Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the Casserole of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous contentment with existing conditions.  This inference was probably drawn from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man’s fortune depends more upon himself than upon his conditions.

As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure to call attention to the following still more remarkable one.  It is from a printer—­not one in our employ.

I wish to congratulate you on the excellence of the REVIEW, both from a literary and mechanical standpoint.  As a “worker,” “a member of the Union,” it might be inferred that I endorse the views of the critics given on page 432 of the second number.  Not so.  It is such views as his that harm the unthinking—­those who think capital is the emblem of wickedness.

I believe that individual merit and worth are the only things worth while.  The workman who puts his best efforts into his labor,