There are nearly a fourth of a thousand farm papers in the United
States, all bent on teaching the farmers how to attend to their own
business. Some of these papers are good, many are bad and the others
are awful. The good ones may be had for a dollar and the others for the
asking. Looking the literary field over, everybody seems to be entitled
to something good but the farmer. From the roasts and broils of the
intellectual feasts of to-day he will get the leavings, next week, in
the shape of a stale hash, served on cheap paper, flanked with guessing
contests and patent medicine advertisements and surrounded by the
green, green cresses of the same old thing.
And yet a large and most respectable majority of the people of these
United States are farmers or interested in the soil. Their daily needs
include all the things the man in the city needs and much more, for
the man in the city does not plow, neither does he reap nor sow. These
people of the soil are progressive to the extent of their chances,
honest, and seekers of the truth and better ways, lovers of the good
in fiction and in fact. They constitute about seventy per cent of our
population and commit about two per cent of our crime. Why should not
they have a literature? Why should not a magazine laid around the soil,
come into their homes, as it comes into the homes of the dwellers in
the strenuous city, not to teach them their business but to help to
amuse, to interest, to uplift?
This is the object of Trotwood’s Monthly. If it does not tell you
when to plant your beans and when to eat your potatoes, it hopes to
give you a literature that will help you to be satisfied with your
diet of potatoes and your burden of beans. For in truth, the editor
of Trotwood’s Monthly does not know all about potatoes nor beans nor
corn. Indeed, he is willing to admit that any good farmer in all this
country who knows his business knows more about it than the editor of
Trotwood’s Monthly. For his business in life is literature. He has
made it his profession, as the farmer or stockman has made farming and
stock-raising his, and he has toiled at it through years in the heat of
the noonday sun and often--often--while the world around him slept, by
the light of a sleepless lamp. He will not try to tell you, therefore,
of the things he knows but little about, neither will he attempt to
carry intellectual coals to a new castle of newly mown hay. He will
not attempt the impossible and the ridiculous; but if, in looking over
his handiwork month after month, you find something to make you forget
for awhile the burdens and problems of life; if through his magazine
you learn to realize the unseen sweetness and independence of the life
of him who claims kindred with the soil; if you are shown nature with
truer eye, and learn to love her and all that is hers; if you catch,
now and then, a spark of that finer spirit that burns so brightly in
true literature, lighting the lamp of ambition in your boy or girl, and
carrying you for a moment from the world of soil to the world of soul;
if something in it uplifts you, and something amuses you and something
in the special features by experts in the classes, who know, instructs
and helps you, then you may know that Trotwood’s Monthly has done for
you what it started out to do.
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Trotwood’s Monthly will, each issue, contain special expert articles
on subjects relating to its scope. There are four in this issue,
and we have reason to be proud of all of them. This is an age of
concentration, of specialization. It is the man who concentrates that
accomplishes. Knowledge to-day is so vast and covers so great a scope
that Solomon’s wisdom would scarcely attract attention unless the
saffron press wrote him with pictures of his wives, and that might make
some think he was not wise at all.
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