And yet a large and most respectable majority of the people of these United States are farmers or interested in the soil. Their daily needs include all the things the man in the city needs and much more, for the man in the city does not plow, neither does he reap nor sow. These people of the soil are progressive to the extent of their chances, honest, and seekers of the truth and better ways, lovers of the good in fiction and in fact. They constitute about seventy per cent of our population and commit about two per cent of our crime. Why should not they have a literature? Why should not a magazine laid around the soil, come into their homes, as it comes into the homes of the dwellers in the strenuous city, not to teach them their business but to help to amuse, to interest, to uplift?
This is the object of Trotwood’s Monthly. If it does not tell you when to plant your beans and when to eat your potatoes, it hopes to give you a literature that will help you to be satisfied with your diet of potatoes and your burden of beans. For in truth, the editor of Trotwood’s Monthly does not know all about potatoes nor beans nor corn. Indeed, he is willing to admit that any good farmer in all this country who knows his business knows more about it than the editor of Trotwood’s Monthly. For his business in life is literature. He has made it his profession, as the farmer or stockman has made farming and stock-raising his, and he has toiled at it through years in the heat of the noonday sun and often—often—while the world around him slept, by the light of a sleepless lamp. He will not try to tell you, therefore, of the things he knows but little about, neither will he attempt to carry intellectual coals to a new castle of newly mown hay. He will not attempt the impossible and the ridiculous; but if, in looking over his handiwork month after month, you find something to make you forget for awhile the burdens and problems of life; if through his magazine you learn to realize the unseen sweetness and independence of the life of him who claims kindred with the soil; if you are shown nature with truer eye, and learn to love her and all that is hers; if you catch, now and then, a spark of that finer spirit that burns so brightly in true literature, lighting the lamp of ambition in your boy or girl, and carrying you for a moment from the world of soil to the world of soul; if something in it uplifts you, and something amuses you and something in the special features by experts in the classes, who know, instructs and helps you, then you may know that Trotwood’s Monthly has done for you what it started out to do.
Trotwood’s Monthly will, each issue, contain special expert articles on subjects relating to its scope. There are four in this issue, and we have reason to be proud of all of them. This is an age of concentration, of specialization. It is the man who concentrates that accomplishes. Knowledge to-day is so vast and covers so great a scope that Solomon’s wisdom would scarcely attract attention unless the saffron press wrote him with pictures of his wives, and that might make some think he was not wise at all.
LINES TO AN AUTOMOBILE.
Break, break, break,
Some other man’s face with glee,
Or shatter his collar-bone if you will,
But, pray, don’t run over me!