Abstract

The Founding of the 'Nation'

The author's recollections of the very early life of the periodical the Nation should fall by their slight intrinsic weight into a clear enough form and make a straight and simple story and yet to take them up in the portentous light of the present public conditions is to become aware at once of a danger which ought perhaps to stay in hand. That danger, the author feels, is the exhibition of complacency out of all proportion to the modest little facts themselves, such light matters of history, as they must assuredly appear. His difficulty comes from the sense that to turn from the distracted world of today to the world of the questions surrounding, even with their then so great bustle of responsibility, the cradle of the most promising scion of the newspaper stock as that stock had rooted itself in American soil, is to sink into a social lap of such soft, sweet material as to suggest comparatively a general beatific state.