Chapter 1

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THE SCRAP BOOK.

Vol. I. MARCH, 1906. No. 1.

Something New in Magazine Making.

THE SCRAP BOOK will be the most elastic thing that ever happened, in the way of a magazine--elastic enough to carry anything from a tin whistle to a battle-ship. This elasticity is just what we should have in magazine-making, but it is precisely what we do not have and cannot have in the conventional magazine, such, for example, as _The Century_, _Harper's_, MUNSEY'S, and _McClure's_.

A certain standard has grown up for these magazines that gives the editor comparatively little latitude. Custom has decreed that they shall carry nothing but original matter, and that it shall be dignified and tremendously magaziny--so magaziny, in fact, that often it is as juiceless as a dried lemon.

To republish, in successive issues of a magazine of this type, a considerable proportion of the gems of the past, or the best things printed in current publications, or to swing away recklessly from convention in the illustrations and make-up, would be to switch the magazine out of its class and into some other which the public would not accept as standard.

In THE SCRAP BOOK we shall be bounded by no such restrictions, no restrictions of any kind that come within the scope of good journalism. With our average of two hundred pages of reading matter, we shall carry the biggest cargo of real, human-interest reading matter that has ever been carried by any magazine in the wide world.

In size alone it will be from forty to eighty pages larger than the standard magazines, and by reason of the fact that its space is not taken up by illustrations, and that we use a smaller, though perfectly distinct type, the number of words in THE SCRAP BOOK will be a good deal more than double that contained in these other magazines.

With such a vast amount and such a wide variety of reading, there is something in THE SCRAP BOOK for every human being who knows how to read and cares at all to read. Everything that appeals to the human brain and human heart will come within the compass of THE SCRAP BOOK--fiction, which is the backbone of periodical circulation; biography, review, philosophy, science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird, the mystical--everything that can be classified and everything that cannot be classified. A paragraph, a little bit, a saying, an editorial, a joke, a maxim, an epigram--all these will be comprised in the monthly budget of THE SCRAP BOOK. We are starting off with four good serial stories, and next month another will be added, and then another, so that we can maintain an average of six.

There isn't anything in the world just like THE SCRAP BOOK--nothing, in fact, that compares with it at all. There are review magazines, and small weekly reviews, and there are, or have been, eclectic magazines; but never before has anything been attempted on the scale and magnitude of this magazine. It is an idea on which we have been working for several years, and for which we have been gathering materials. We have bought hundreds and hundreds of scrap books from all over the country, some of them a century old, and are still buying them. From these books we are gathering and classifying an enormous number of gems, and facts and figures, and historical and personal bits that are of rare value.

Furthermore, we have a corps of people ransacking libraries, reading all the current publications, the leading daily papers, and digging out curious and quaint facts and useful facts and figures from reference books, cyclopedias, etc., etc.

This first number is but the beginning of what we have in mind for THE SCRAP BOOK. It is so voluminous in the number of its words, and so varied in its subjects, that in arrangement and matter it necessarily falls short of the perfected magazine at which we are aiming. Our purpose, in a word, is to give more first-rate reading, on a wide variety of subjects, for our great big eighty millions of people than has ever before been presented in any single periodical, and to give this magazine at the people's price--the nimble dime.

FRANK A. MUNSEY.

The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While

James J. Hill Warns America of Dangers that Threaten Her Future--Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Avebury Deal with the Questions of the Day in England--Dr. Martin Predicts a Great Awakening in China--Governor Folk Foresees the Downfall of "Graft"--Lewis Nixon Speaks of What He Saw in Russia--Dr. Osler Explains His Philosophy of Life--Russell Sage Gives Some Practical Advice--With Other Striking Expressions of Opinion from People of National or International Reputation.

_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.

THE COMING TEST OF AMERICAN RESOURCES.

James J. Hill, Seeing Trouble Ahead, Warns His Fellow Countrymen That There Are Dangers to Be Met.

At last James J. Hill--the silent railroad king of the Northwest, has given us his full and free opinion on the business policy of the United States. Throughout his long career it has been his plan to "say nothing and saw wood." He has been too busy to talk. The man who plunges into a dense wilderness, as he did, and transforms it into four or five prosperous States, has no time to run a public opinion factory.

But recently, while at a gathering of his friends in St. Paul, Mr. Hill unlocked his tongue and spoke out. It was a remarkable address, made by a remarkable man, and the meat of it was as follows:

The nation at large feels that it is immensely prosperous. We are cutting a wide swath; there is no doubt of it. But if we will get down closer and examine what we are doing, we will find that we are living profligately and squandering our heritage in every possible manner.

We should insist upon better cultivation of the land. For on that one item depends your future growth and prosperity, and there is no other item to which you can look; no other source of wealth than that which comes out of the cultivation of the soil.

If the soil is protected, if it is intelligently handled, if your crops are properly rotated, if the land is fertilized and rested and treated with proper care, you have a mine in the soil that will never be exhausted; quite unlike the other mine.

The millions and hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the Northwest from the annual crops, while it is large, isn't half as large as it ought to be.

Our Free Lands Are Gone.

Our public domain is exhausted. Last year over a million people came from across the Atlantic to the United States, and the natural increase certainly is a million and a half more. What is to become of these people? They are to be driven fairly into the factories and workshops and no place else.

They can leave our country and go to the Canadian Northwest, as many have gone. But that country will be populated to its extent very soon, much sooner than you think. It has not an unlimited area.

Try and cast your mind twenty or twenty-five years ahead. At that time we should have one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty millions of people. Where are they going? Who is going to feed them? They can manufacture. We have the raw material. We have the coal and the iron and the copper and the lead. They can manufacture. Who will buy it?

We have got to a point where we are selling our heritage; we are selling our rich deposits of iron and our coal and our rich soil, and exhausting it as well.

People of other countries are exercising the utmost, closest intelligence in everything that pertains to economy in production. Take, for instance, the German nation to-day, and they lead the world or any period in the history of the world in industrial intelligence and industrial management.

Competition Grows Fiercer.

I was in England in November, and met a sad sight--Trafalgar Square filled with idle people, large numbers of idle people asking for bread up around Hyde Park. Why? The men who carry on the work, who paid the pay-rolls, are no longer engaged in the business.

What they had they have turned into money, and have bought securities or something else, trying to save what they have got.

In the west of England, which was a great center of broadcloth manufacturing and of woolen goods, their output is less than a quarter of what it was twenty-five years ago. Germany is selling cutlery in Sheffield.

And I took pains to look around London, and to walk into the shops and find out. I couldn't buy a pair of lisle-thread gloves that were not made in Germany. Underclothing, stockings, cloth, almost everything made in Germany. They have a system of education in Germany. They educate their men.

Now I am not going to undertake to say that their way is better than ours, but I want to impress this on you, that when this country has a hundred and fifty million people they have got to do something; they have got to earn a living.

Who will buy the goods? Who will employ them? In what shape are they to meet the competition that England is meeting to-day? And a million and a half of idle men asking for bread in England, and no bread for them except such as charity doles out. They have got to be carried out of Great Britain and a new place found for them. There is no other solution.

It is all well enough to talk about what we are doing. Examine it closely and you will find that we are doing nothing except selling our natural resources and exhausting them. When you dig a ton of ore out of the ground you can't plant another ton, as you could potatoes; it is gone. And when the fertility of our fields, the fertility of the soil is gone, where are we going to replace it from?

Teach the Boys to Work.

I am not going to find fault with education; it never hurt anybody. But if, in place of spending so much time and so much money on languages and higher studies, we fitted them for the life that they are going to follow, for the sphere in which they are going to move, we would do more for them.

I know that in two or three, more or less, railroads in which I am interested, the pay-rolls cover eighty to ninety thousand people. We have tried all manner of young men--college men, high-school men, and everything else--and I will take a boy at fifteen years old who has to make a living--his chances will be better if he has to contribute to the support of a widowed mother--I will take him and make a man of him, and get him in the first place, before you would get most of the others to enter the race with him; simply because he has to work. He has to work, he has the spur of necessity; he must work.

If there be anything that you can do, I feel sure that you will all put your hands to the plow and help; but you will never build a city faster than you have a country to support it. And that is the first and the most important thing.

FREE TRADE IS VITAL TO GREAT BRITAIN.

Sir Henry Fowler Says that an Import Tax Upon Food Would Be Ruinous to the English People.

Free Trade, which has been the policy of England for sixty years, is again on trial, and the battle waxes fierce. There is a growing effort to work in the thin wedge of "a moderate tariff, not protective but defensive," but the opposition are fighting it with every weapon in their armory of protest. England to-day is not self-supporting, her rural industries have been declining for years, and the country receives from abroad the far larger quantity of its food and raw material.

Thirty per cent of the people are underfed and on the verge of hunger. Thirty per cent of forty-one millions comes to over twelve millions.

This significant statement comes from the lips of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new English premier, in a speech against the proposal for preferential tariffs with the colonies, at Perth, on June 5, 1903. Three years has not changed the situation for the better.

Winston Churchill, M.P., puts the situation thus:

The mass of people are absolutely dependent for the food they eat and the material they employ upon supplies of food and raw material which reach them mainly from abroad. They are dependent on the condition of a crop at one end of the world and the state of a market at the other; and yet, upon this artificial foundation, through this inestimable advantage of unfettered enterprise and of unrestricted sea-communication, they have been able to build up a vast industrial fabric which it is no exaggeration to say is the economic marvel of the world.

In 1904, the amount of merchandise brought into the United Kingdom was nearly $2,740,000,000. For thirty years England's imports have been rapidly increasing, while her exports, comparatively speaking, have remained stationary. The situation can be put in a way readily appreciated by Americans if we realize that the entire British Isles are smaller than New Mexico, and yet contain about half as many people as are in the United States.

It is the foreign trade of Great Britain that is claimed to be the salvation of the nation. In 1904 this amounted to over $4,600,000,000, and last year, the figures for which have not yet been published, was the greatest in oversea trade in the history of the nation.

Sir Henry Fowler, a leader of the Liberals, said, in a recent speech:

The question of free trade is the greatest which has been before the country for the past half century. The young men of to-day are absolutely ignorant. They do not know what it means and the issues it involves. If the great system of free trade were interfered with, if the attempt were successful which is being made to reverse the policy of the past sixty years on which the overwhelming bulk of political economists were united, I foretell for this country a time of the greatest disaster. All classes would suffer, especially the working class.

Dealing with the question of exports and imports, he pointed out:

Eighty per cent of what came into Great Britain represented raw material necessary for manufactures and food necessary for the people. Therefore the prosperity of this country depends, not upon its exports, but upon its imports. We are free-traders, not for the injury it does others, but in our own interests. It is to our advantage to buy cheap. Our greatest import is food and the next raw material. We can only pay by our own manufactures.

ENGLAND'S DEFENSES, AND WHAT THEY COST.

It Is Not Military Strength That Makes a Country Great, Says Lord Avebury, but the Right Use of Power.

That the burden of armament lies heavy on Europe is well understood. It is not so commonly known that in the last ten years the cost of army and navy has increased much more rapidly in Great Britain than in any country of the Continent. The fact is brought out in the _Nineteenth Century_ by Lord Avebury, who is better known to Americans as Sir John Lubbock. He says:

In our own case there has been on the army an increase in the past ten years of £24,800,000, and on the navy an increase of £25,000,000; or, taking the two together, in round figures an increase of no less than £50,000,000, of which, however, only £39,000,000 is shown in the ordinary estimates. In other words, while Italy has increased her naval and military expenditures by £1,500,000; Russia, £10,800,000; Germany, £8,700,000, and France, £6,000,000, we have increased ours £50,000,000. Thus these four great countries put together show an increase of £27,000,000, while ours by itself is £50,000,000, or nearly double that of Russia, Germany, France, and Italy put together. What justification have we for this enormous increase?

I do not wish to exaggerate, nor to maintain that we are going down-hill. But our progress has been checked, and if we are not wise in time worse will follow.

Lord Avebury's political opponents would argue that the British military expenditures have been exceptional because the Boer War proved the country unprepared for any great military undertaking, and necessitated elaborate efforts. However, the figures are startling, and give point to Lord Avebury's conclusion:

We sometimes hear of "Little Englanders." I hope we shall not let ourselves be stung into extravagance and war by any such taunt. There are many who have strong views as to what constitutes the true greatness of a country. It is not wealth, but the application of it; not the numbers of the people, but their character and wellbeing; not the strength, but the use made of it. We do not wish for England the dangerous power of dictation or the seductive glamour of conquest, but that our people may be happy and contented; that we may do what we can to promote the peace, progress, and prosperity of mankind, and that we may deserve, even if we do not secure, the respect, the confidence, and the good-will of other nations.

Being once more happily at peace with all the world, our financial policy should be to reduce expenditure, pay off debt, increase our reserves, and lighten the taxes which now press so heavily on the springs of industry.

THE CHEERY OPTIMISM OF LITTLE JAPAN.

A Nippon Statesman Tells How the Britain of the East Looks Hopefully to New Horizons.

The Japanese are winning fresh admiration for the cheerful optimism with which they face the perplexing financial conditions following the war. In the _Forum_ for January, Baron Shibuzawa expresses a sentiment general among Japanese statesmen:

It would be out of tune with all things, for us, at this hour, to be looking upon financial Japan after the war with a sad eye. Nevertheless, as we are well aware of the disturbances which the war has brought to our finances, we must look to the best possible measures for restoring to health and prosperity what the war has disturbed. That is all. But the war and its conclusion have brought us one very great and precious gift, namely, it has admitted us into the household of the great economic world. In a word, it has given a wider horizon to the economic circle of Nippon, and has brought us into the very heart of the comity and exchange of the economic interests of all human kind; and has linked us, in a sense hitherto unknown to us, with the markets of the world.

THE GREAT AWAKENING OF THE CHINESE GIANT.

Are China's Four Hundred Millions Preparing Themselves to Turn Against the Western Nations?

Dr. W.A.P. Martin, who has been identified with China since 1850, and whose least statement about that country is authoritative, gives some interesting and important facts in the _World's Work_ with reference to how the sleeping Chinese giant is awakening. Referring to the work of Chang, Viceroy of central China, Dr. Martin says:

The banks of the river in front of his capital, Wuchang, are lined for miles with cotton mills, hempworks, silk filatures, glassworks, iron foundries, and powder-mills, whose high chimneys proclaim the coming war. When China can supply her own markets, foreign steamers will cease to ascend the Yang-tse-Kiang.

In view of the fact that China's educational system was established more than twenty-five hundred years before Christ, and that up to only a few months ago the official examinations were restricted exclusively to subjects relating to China's literature and history, what Dr. Martin tells us of the rapid growth of schoolhouses is surprising and significant.

Going within the walls, we are struck by the great number of fine schoolhouses in foreign style that rise above the huts of the natives. Our clever viceroy knows that the industrial arts have their root in science and that science must be taught in schools. He thus proclaims from the housetops his gospel of the new education. He has embodied it in a book of rhymes, which are sung by his soldiers to the beat of the drum, and committed to memory by all the school children in a population of fifty millions. The following are some of his sounding periods:

We pride ourselves on our antiquity, But foreign nations ridicule our weakness. Knowledge is power. What but their newly acquired knowledge Enabled the Japanese to gain the victory over us And win for themselves a place Among the great powers of the earth? Over against their three small islands Have we not a vast territory with four hundred millions? If we of the yellow race learn to stand together Where is the nation that will dare to molest us?

The empress dowager and all her grandees have become converts to Chang's new gospel. Not merely has she reenacted the emperor's ordinance for the establishment of graded schools in all the provinces--ousting the idols and using their temples for want of houses--she has cut down the annual expenses of her theatrical troupe to one-third and devoted the other two-thirds to the erection of schoolhouses.

Teachers for these Chinese schools are being largely provided by the normal colleges in Japan, which contain over four thousand Chinese students, including both sexes. Such, at least, is the claim of another recent writer upon the Chinese awakening; this time a Japanese, Adachi Kinnosuke.

WE MUST HAVE EQUAL LAWS FOR ALL.

But Every Law Looks Blue to the Man Who Wants to Break It, Says Governor Folk, of Missouri.

Governor Joseph W. Folk, who became the most popular man in Missouri because he dared to enforce the laws without fear or favor, until lately has been too busy putting grafters in jail to talk about his work. But in a speech which he made the other day in Boston, he told pretty clearly what he is aiming at. He said:

The trust manager defies the laws of the State against combinations and monopolies, and then calls for the protection of the State for his property.

The dram-shop keeper wants the law enforced against the man who robs his cash-drawer, but thinks he has a right to break the law requiring his saloon to close on Sunday.

The burglar detests the law-breaking of the trust, but considers the statute against housebreaking as an interference with his personal liberty.

Governor Folk thinks that King Graft has just about come to the end of his reign:

Wealth is not worshiped with the same devotion it used to be. A new standard has been established; new, yet old--just honesty; that is all. The remedy for corruption has been found in the hearts of the American people.

RUSSIA WILL ADVANCE, SAYS LEWIS NIXON.

With the Birth of Democracy and Industrialism, a New Day Will Dawn For the Great Slavonic People.

Lewis Nixon, who has been suggesting plans for the reconstruction of the Russian navy, believes that democracy is the proper medicine for the Czar's distracted country. The people have been dwarfed by despotism, he says, but they are now making wonderful progress in manufacturing and opening up their enormous country. In a recent interview, Mr. Nixon says:

Russia needs two things to enable her to feed the rest of Europe--cheap money and cheap transportation.