The journalistic market is glutted with explosives, it is overstocked with poisoned arrows. We believe in the philosophy that “More flies are caught with sugar than with vinegar.”
But while this magazine shall be a colossal sugar lump, yet its management has a whole squadron of torpedo boats, and a huge quiver of arrows for all the enemies of the South and a stupendous tank of vinegar as large as all the tanks of the Standard Oil Company for the spiteful spiders and blue-bottle flies of sectional journalism. But these weapons shall never be used so long as sugar will melt in the mouths of men and persuade unrighteousness to bridle its tongue.
With these sweet sentiments upon our lips we stand on the tallest tower of our castle in the air and with our politest bow toss a large sugar lump of greeting to every one who is wise enough to subscribe for Bob Taylor’s Magazine.
Fly in Your Own Firmament.
When downy-lipped youth first begins to peep through the knothole in the temple of knowledge, he is the happiest of all mortals because his vanity is unbridled and free.
He knows it all. When he “orates” on commencement day he robs the gardens of rhetoric and twines their choicest flowers about the beautiful, but hollow and flimsy columns of his speech. He misquotes the classic poets and taxes the old philosophers with things they never said. He twists the tail of history, strangles science, and spouts wisdom never dreamed of by Solomon. His impassioned sentences are chains of gold with blazing diamonds strung, and his tropes and similes cavort like flaming meteors athwart the intellectual heavens. But after he leaves the classic halls of college, and after a few hard bumps against the rock walls of reality, and a few hard falls on the ice pond of experience, his self-conceit springs a leak, his immense learning oozes out, and his dream of kinship with the gods vanishes into the limbo of the forever forgotten like a sweet scent before a high wind.
His vanity is un’ridled and free.
And so runs the endless story of callow youth—a comedy of errors reenacted by each successive generation, in whose quips and cranks and boyish antics we see ourselves repeated as in a mirror, and we only laugh and wish that youth might last forever—we laugh and enjoy its beautiful vanities.
But our laughter melts into sighs as we recall the Persian poet’s plaintive lines: