Many of our readers whom we have met have asked: "Why don't you give us the names of your contributors?" and we suppose that many whom we have not had the pleasure of meeting have the same curiosity.
Well, in the first place, we wish our articles to be taken on their merits, and each, so far as practicable, to carry whatever authority the Review as a whole may be able to attain.
Next, among the popular fashions that we do not wish to follow is that of exploiting names.
And finally, to be very candid, we need to profit by whatever discussion may be aroused by speculation regarding the authorship of the contributions.
Three months of anonymity, however, will be enough to secure the first consideration, to lessen the objections inherent in the second, and to give us most of whatever benefit may be realized from the third; and therefore in such lists of contents of previous numbers as are included in our advertising pages, we shall indicate the authors.
Moreover our advertising pages will often include lists of our most frequent contributors, and this may add zest to such guessing at the authorship of contributions as our readers may care to do.
Virtually all our contributors approve the anonymity, perhaps partly because the names of most of them are so well known as to make farther publicity a matter of indifference.
Another question often put to us by friends is: "How are you getting along?"
Well (again), as our title indicates, we entered upon the enterprise with our eyes wide open to the fact that it could never be popular. Our only hope was that there might be enough people with standards above the popular, to support the undertaking. We still feel justified in entertaining that hope. Of course some ludicrous failures to understand what we are about have been forced upon our attention, but not as many as we expected; and we looked for more letters like the first one following, which, we are surprised and glad to say, is the only one of the kind we have received. All other dissent has been expressed with intelligence and courtesy; and this is the only occasion when our motives have been impugned. We think we can trust our readers to understand why we give the letter, and also the answer which the writer of the letter did not expect us to send. The former seems to us one of the most interesting and instructive contributions it has been our privilege to present, though not exactly for the reasons which make our other contributions worth while. We are glad to repeat, however, that the indications, so far, are that there is less of this sort of thing about than we had supposed.