Fiske is under contract, James would give nothing more to the _Atlantic_, you were ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers.

Beyond these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women.

I can (soon) get all that I could ever have got in the _Atlantic_ and new ones (I know they'll come) whom I could never have got there.
You'll see--within a year or two--by far a better magazine than I have ever made; and you and I will differ in nothing unless you feel despair about the breakdown of certain democratic theories, which I think were always mere theories.

Let 'em go! The real thing, which is life and action, is better.
Heartily and always your grateful friend, Walter H.Page Thus the fact that Page's new magazine was intended for a popular audience was not the result of accident, but of design.

It represented a periodical plan which had long been taking shape in Page's mind.