THE OLD GUARD

With Bernard McFadden and "I Confess" forging rapidly into the financial leadership of Periodical Row, the "quality magazines", as Leon Whipple describes them in Survey Graphic, have been forced to reorganize and to adopt new taedes. The revolution has been on the whole successful from every point of view; the Atlantic Monthe Harper's and Scribner's have emerged from the fray with larger circulations and a new vitality. Brilliant covers and a lack of pictures have attracted fresh cohorts and won back many of the deserters. The chief factor, however, has been the growing belligerency and inquisitiveness of the magazines; no longer do they remain discreetly silent on religious, political and social questions, fearing that they might lose a few subscribers through lack of tact. Instead they have made their columns open forums for intelligent, liberal and sometimes radical opinion.

Since the movement is in the hands of capable and same editors there is no fear that the pendulum will swing too far and crash into sensationalism. Mr. Whipple says that when Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Bridges took over the fate of the dying Atlantic Monthly they put in new blood and "hung quietly in the skeleton closet the notion that the Atlantic was a sort of spinster literary chaperone and that its buff cover conspicuously enough displayed would protect an unattended female anywhere in the world." The new governors of other magazines have done no less. The scarlet of Harper's may enclose as many and as vitriolic shafts directed against complacency as the verdant boards of the less adroit Mercury.