Sallie T. Parrish, Adel, Ga.
I believe your Magazine is more eagerly awaited than any other publication extant, and I think the people read what you write first. I am sure I do. You are the only writer who has ever made politics more fascinating to me than romance.
I used to read your paper when I was a child almost as ardently as I read the Magazine now. Some of the editorials appealed to me so strongly that I preserved them in my scrap book, not because I understood them then, but because I felt intuitively that there was something sublime in them.
Not long since I showed one of those selections—The Highest Office—to a young man—a Democrat and a teacher in the same school that I was. He finished reading it just as the bell rang for the morning session. The moment the opening exercises were over he sprang upon the rostrum, shook his black hair out of his face and exclaimed: “Children, I have found a gem! Let me read it to you.”
Your Magazine is being read by many honest Democrats who a few years ago thought the Democratic party was all it claimed to be and that you were wrong. Now they frankly endorse your principles and praise your courage, honesty and brilliant intellect.
I must thank you for a clearer knowledge of political questions, public affairs and economic conditions than I ever would have had had it not been for you.
Your “Bethany” I consider one of the treasures of my modest collection of books. Not long ago one of those reasonable, broad-minded, intelligent Democrats was telling me how much he liked your Magazine. He said he read everything in it—“Pole Baker” and all the rest—that he didn’t think you had ever written an uninteresting sentence in your life and that he thought you the purest, most upright man in public life today.
I asked him if he had read “Bethany.” He had not, but when I told him about it he was anxious to do so. I sent him mine. He is a man near sixty and he read it with all the intensity and abandon that a sentimental girl of sixteen would devour one of Laura Jean Libbey’s novels. He and I were alternate day watchers at the bedside of a convalescent patient—one very dear to us both—but I had it all to myself that day until late in the afternoon, when the blessed trained nurse decided to forego a part of her nap and relieve me awhile.
I think you have done and are doing the world more good than any other man in it, and I hope that you may be granted many years of life and strength to champion the cause of humanity and labor for justice, truth and equity, and I know that some time your noble life will be rewarded.
I am very glad you have added the department of “Books” to your Magazine. I don’t think it could be improved now, unless you were to add an amateur or young writer’s department.