The Argosy, October 1906 — page 108: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

2 ANOTHER NEW MAGAZINE FROM THE MUNSEY HOUSE. perhaps fifty millions to the railroad, without which our development would have been confined to the Atlantic coast. We should have had no way of bringing grain and cattle from the West, no way of transporting coal from the mines and iron ore to the furnaces, or of carrying the finished product to the centers of trade. Gold and silver and copper would still largely be locked up in the recesses of the mountains. But the material development brought about by the railroad is not the sum of its achievements. It has made us a big people, a broad people, a great people. The very vastness of things brought within the compass of man by the railroad has stamped itself upon us and made us bigger in conception and execution. And this growth having taken on a momentum, the process of expansion, with our people, has kept pace with the marvelous development of the railroads and all other phases of industry. We think in a big way, see things in a bir way, and are reaching up higher and higher all the while to measure up to our ever-expanding conceptions. And in this magic transformation which in a day, as it were, has developed a little nation into the most powerful in all the world, the railroad has played the great and all-important part. "To-day, with its various ramifications and allied interests, the railroad business is the biggest industry in America with the one exception of agriculture. And yet there is no magazine of general interest, so far as I know, which contains special features of direct interest to the railroad workers and their families. It is singular that this is the fact when there are perhaps as many as five hundred publications of one grade and another that are published for the farmer and his family—publications that contain a considerable percentage of reading of a technical farming nature, together with fiction, general information, biography, poetry, and such other items and articles as make good, wholesome, and interesting reading for the home and fireside. The fact that there is a demand on the part of farmers for all these agricultural journals makes me marvel that no publisher hitherto has thought to issue a publication for the railroad man, who represents the second largest industry in our Western World. Well, at last you have one—you, the railroad workers of America, and [| hope you will find in it a good many facts and articles and bits of news that should naturally interest you and all those directly or indirectly connected with railroading. But in addition to these specific features that ring of the rail I am sure you will find in it an immense amount of good general reading, some instructive, some amusing, and much that is entertaining. And after all it is the entertaining things—the good, warm-blooded human stories of deep vital interest—that take hold of us and make us a nation of magazine readers. My experience in the publishing business justifies me in saying that, if all fiction were to be eliminated from the magazines of America, their combined circula- tion would speedily dwindle to not over twenty per cent of the present total. If this deduction is correct, and it is not a careless bit of analysis, it is clear that the Eomichbooksnco