Abstract

A Young Man's Oracle

The editor of the periodical, the Nation has asked the author to write of its early relations to the publishing trade. The author told him that he could not write of the periodical and confines himself to that, without mixing in his personal recollections of its great founder and one of its literary editors, any more naturally than he could write of the Heaven now before him, by Lake Champlain and confine himself to the region's production of potatoes and fish. Perhaps he could so write with an effort and many excisions; but the author doesn't believe the result would be as satisfactory as it would if he writes without restraint and give the whole of the matter as it was related to the whole of him and few things in his long life have related to so much of him. The Nation was started in July, 1865, and after a little preliminary skirmishing in connection with that model publisher, G.P. Putnam, the author began the publishing business with his present house, in November of the same year. He believed they have had an advertisement in every number of the Nation during the virtually fifty years since, unless one or two may have been omitted by accident.