IMPORTANT
Members are urged to remember the recent doubling of dues, whereby all renewals became Two Dollars each.
The fullest of apologies is due the membership for the lateness of this issue of The United Amateur. A prostrating and overwhelming flood of professional duties, coupled with a state of health permitting only the shortest of working hours, has forced the editor to delay transmission of this copy to the publisher until November 4: a date which should be remembered in justice to the latter official, who is equally handicapped in the matter of conflicting duties.
The Editor
Editorial
In the excellent October Woodbee, Mr. Leo Fritter criticises with much force the attempt of the present editor to conduct The United Amateur on a tolerably civilised plane. He points out that the appearance of a journal representing a fairly uniform maturity of thought and artistic development may perhaps tend to discourage those newer aspirants who have not yet attained their full literary stature, and thus defeat the educational ends of the Association.
Mr. Fritter gathers his material for complaint from the opinions of certain amateurs with whom he has held communication, and on this basis alleges a "wide-spreading dissatisfaction" with the present editorial policy. We have ourselves received numerous and enthusiastic assurances of an opposite nature, especially since the Fritter attack, so that we must rebut at least his charge that we are ignoring the membership's wishes and "trying to conform them to a mould we have arbitrarily cast according to ideas of our own." To adopt a lower standard would, indeed, be affronting a more influential element than that which may at present be dissatisfied; an element which has possibly gained higher claims to consideration through the continuous nature of its services to the Association during trying times when others were silent and inactive.