It is so very easy to speak your mind about people you do not like. The only limit to your dispraise is the law of criminal libel. It is not so easy to write about a person of whom genuinely you are fond. If you say all that you think, folks are apt to call you a gusher. If, in an effort to avoid such criticism, you go to the other extreme and show over-much reticence regarding the good points of him who is your subject, the reader is as likely to accuse you of being lacking in appreciation and enthusiasm. As between being labeled a gusher and labeled a chilled and reserved biographist I prefer the former rôle. I would rather be a geyser than a glacier-when it comes to my friends.

Howsomever, in sitting down to indite a little piece about George Horace Lorimer, I find myself less circumscribed than I might be were I taking many another man for my text. Considering the qualities and quantities, the mental displacement and the gross personal tonnage of the topic, there is no need for me to be fulsome. On the other hand I have no intention of being calmly

and coldly statistical. A plain statement of the facts as I know them will suffice, I take it, to do ample justice to my theme. From my pen or any other man's he needs no mercy. Nor is it necessary for me to go deeply into rhetorical forms of speech nor yet to adorn my periods with superlatives. Anyhow, there is nothing adjectival about the make-up of this man Lorimer. He is one of the big, outstanding, human nouns of his day and time.

I have known him for seven years, about. I have been working for him for a slightly longer period. I have liked him-liked him unstintedly and without reservations of any sortever since I knew him. I expect to go on liking him to the end of the chapter because I know he won't change in any of the traits which I find, in him, admirable. He is not the kind who ever will change. He stays put.

You won't find very much about Lorimer in any of the standard reference works on English-speaking celebrities and for a very good reason, too, the reason being that Lorimer himself furnished the data. To

him Who's Who never meant Who's Ballyhoo and never will. One gathers that he was born; that he grew up; that he went to school; that he went to work; that he married; that he wrote divers writings; that he held divers jobs and that the last job he held-namely editor of "The Saturday Evening Post"-he continues yet to hold. That, substantially, is all.

In telling about himself he exhibited the same gifts of conciseness and tasteful restraint in the choice of language which mark his correspondence, both professional and personal. On various subjects I suppose I have had hundreds of letters from him. I do not remember any letter from him that embodied more than two hundred words, including address, date and signature. Usually a Lorimer letter runs to about four typewritten lines. Yet I never had one from him which left me in any doubt whatsoever as to what he meant. Indeed, in all his intercourse with his fellow man Lorimer has this somewhat rare faculty: when he begins to speak he knows exactly what he is going to say and when he has said it he is through and he stops. I never knew him to say no when he meant yes. I never knew him to say yes when he meant no. I never knew him to say, "Well, possibly so", under any circumstances.

If Lorimer stands out preeminently as the most powerful, the most successful and the most capable magazine editor of his generation, or perhaps of any generation, it is not because of what he has said about himself but because of what he has done by himself. In general company he is never the one to take the conversational lead; yet, coming away afterward, you are more likely to re

member the few things Lorimer said than the many things someone else may have said. If there were a hundred men in a crowd he would be the first and not the hundredth in whom the casual stranger would be interested. He no more can help standing out from the run of men about him than Pike's Peak can help being a conspicuous feature of the landscape in its vicinity.

This is partly due, I would say, to the unconscious but constant radiation of ability and power from the man; and partly due to his possession of that indefinable something which sometimes is called magnetism and sometimes is called personality; but most of all it is due to the fact that in appearance, in manner, in habit of life, in his energy and his optimism, in his knack of instantaneous appraisal and definite judgment regarding any proposition whatsoever; in his shortcomings and his virtues, in his present record of achievement and in his promise of future performances, Lorimer more nearly approximates the popular conceptionand incidentally the proper one-of the typical American than any man I have known. It is quite in accord with his breeding, his training and his environment that this last should be true of him. He was born in the South, of a commingling of AngloSaxon strains; he got his earlier experience in the Middle West; he was educated in the East and he first came into national prominence as a resident of the Keystone State of the Union.

He has the mental and the temperamental gaits which would have made him conspicuous as an executive in almost any line of business endeavor. I am sure he would have been a great president of a railway

system or a great manager of a life insurance company or a great organizer of commercial efficiency. Indeed, as a very young man he was in a fair way to become one of the biggest men in the packing industries, only he chose to quit his offices at the Armour plant out in Chicago to take up newspaper reporting at perhaps one-tenth of the annual income he had been enjoying.

I am quite confident that in politics, had his fancy inclined to politics, he could, within reason, have gone as far as he liked. I like to think what a galvanizing and a humanizing influence he would be were he the holder, say, of a cabinet portfolio-upon some slow-moving, moribund presidential administration. He would have made a good actor although about him there is nothing of the theatricalism, the striving for dramatics, which you will find in a good many actors. By the same token he would have made a noteworthy public speaker. Had he gone either upon the stage or the platform he would have been following after hereditary impulses, seeing that his father, the late Reverend George C. Lorimer, was in his early youth a distinguished Scotch actor and in maturity ranked with the most eloquent and powerful of American clergymen.

Lorimer could have been one of the most eminent satirical humorists this country ever produced; as a matter of fact, he is just exactly that, although some folks are apt to forget this in the contemplation of his present prominence as an editor. His "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son" brought to the attention of the world a new kind of American humor, which masked itself, as all true humor must, behind the screens

of a shrewd wisdom and a deep, sincere philosophy. These same "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son", rich as they were in slang and the colloquialisms of the Corn Belt vernacular, vernacular, have been translated into more languages and circulated more generally in all parts of the globe than any other book of American authorship since "Uncle Tom's

Cabin".

He might have been any one of these things. He chose to be the most brilliant figure on the editorial side of the magazine field. I deem it a fitting circumstance that he should have carried to enormous enlargement the weekly publication which Benjamin Franklin created. Franklin was a true American humorist; so is Lorimer. The Poor Richard of Franklin's "Almanac" was a worthy progenitor of the Old Gorgon Graham of Lorimer's "Merchant's Letters". Franklin as truly represented the trends and slants of American thought in his day as Lorimer has presented them in this day. There, though, the analogy ends. Franklin never made a financial success of the periodical he had established. In truth it was never a success, financially or circulation-wise, until George Horace Lorimer became its responsible head considerably more. than a century and a half after it was founded.

There is a romance and a big one -too big a one to be told in the space allotted me here of the conditions under which Lorimer became the editor of the "Post" and of how chance for that really was what it was-gave him his opportunity to try out certain revolutionary magazine ideas, which had been forming in his mind from the time he broke into the writing profession and

which had taken definite shape inside his head during a short apprentice period when he served as an assistant editor on the paper of which now, rather suddenly, he had become the chief with power to do what he might please in its pages. It is stretching no point to say that the day Lorimer took over the editorship of "The Saturday Evening Post" marked a new day in American periodical literature. For one thing it was directly due to him, as much by what he wrote as by what he caused others to write, that the romance of American business life was translated into the printed word. As truly as Columbus discovered America, so Lorimer discovered the fictional possibilities, for tragedy, for comedy and for drama in our stores and our shops and our stockrooms. He was to prove that a socalled popular magazine could be bright without being yellow; that it could be instructive without being pedantic; that it could be effective without being preachy or teachy; that it could be good-humored without being silly; that it could be entertaining without being smutty; that it could be distinctive without being freakish; that it could command attention without a constant blowing of its own clarionet, and that it could be carried to a high average of excellence without being made topheavy by a sense of its own selfimportance or light-headed by its own success. Lorimer has always believed-and his works offer abundant proof of the faith which is in him that it is easier to kill off an evil thing by ridiculing it wittily than by scolding at it shrilly.

Every institution, be it great or small, is a physical reflection of the personality of some individual. "The

Saturday Evening Post" is a reflection of the personality of its editor. If you like the "Post" you probably would like Lorimer. If you do not like the "Post" the chances are you would not care for Lorimer. It expresses him the more surely because he is in sole control of its columns as final dictator. He passes not only upon its literary contents but upon its advertising contents as well. Here is one magazine that is edited from its editorial room and not from its counting room. It is a property of the Curtis Publishing Company, but no man can say that because he has bought space of the Curtis Publishing Company, he has a voice in guiding the policy or in shaping the course of the property.

It was Cyrus H. K. Curtis, one of the most brilliant and one of the most selfeffacing figures in American publishing, who discerned in the young man Lorimer the makings of an editor. Having made him an editor, Mr. Curtis displayed another phase of executive genius by thereafter letting Lorimer alone to work out his own editorial destinies and with them the destinies of the periodical. One result is that the "Post", through these recent years of its growth to greatness, has had but one boss-an easy boss as any one of those who work under him and who come directly in contact with him will tell you—but nevertheless a boss, absolute, supreme and with powers unlimited. Another result is a circulation of two million weekly or a little the rise of that figure.

Before now there have been great editors and near-great editors of magazines who loved to dress the part-who in business hours were to be found enshrined in sanctums like endowed chapels, steeping their

solemn souls in an atmosphere of rarefied intellectual calm, surrounded by an almost ecclesiastical air of aloofness and grandeur. To reach their presence one must filter through the sieving hands of from three to a dozen underlings-indeed, one had to know the password or a prominent advertiser to get into their outer offices at all.

Lorimer isn't built this way. About him there is none of the pose of the high priest; he never plays the rôle of the Grand Llama of literature. Either he is too big a man to have small affectations or he hasn't time to spare for cultivating them properly; or it may be that he has so much natural poise he finds no need for the exercise of an acquired and studied dignity. He is as plain as an old shoe, in fact, as plain as a pair of old shoes. Anybody can get in to see him without ceremonial fuss and feathers either, but nobody can stay with him very long unless that somebody has something to say, and the knack of saying it straightaway.

You go to call on Lorimer; you, a stranger. An office boy takes your card and in a minute or two, usually, your turn comes. You walk along a hallway and through an open door into an office slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island. Behind a big, square desk at the far end of the room sits a man of medium size-a compactly built, rather sinewy looking man with a long, strong, angular jaw, a small, keen, blue eye and a squarish think-box of a head thatched with brown hair which is beginning to turn gray above the lean temples. He has shapely, slender fingers-the fingers of an artist and a creator. He has deep, witty lines around his mouth, and a kindly twinkle in the

blue eye. If you have an idea to present he listens patiently enough but very often before you are done with the job of outlining it, he breaks in with a short, laconic comment and then realization comes to you that the thing you have been mulling over for weeks was merely half an idea, and that this man who probably never thought of it until five minutes ago has, in fifty words, supplied you with the remaining half and made it a structure complete and adequate. At taking mental short cuts I have yet to see his equal anywhere. He never thinks around a subject he thinks through it and comes out on the other side with the sum total in his hand, all neatly wrapped up and ready for delivery.

Having an enormous capacity for work, he never appears to be in a hurry and I have never known him to be flurried. He reads every line the "Post" prints but he doesn't change many of the said lines. The story or the serial or the article you have submitted either suits him as it stands, or it doesn't suit him. If it suits him he accepts it out of hand and you get your check next Tuesday. If it doesn't suit him he sends it back, without asking you to rewrite it or recast it. He is fond of saying that he is not running a correspondence school in literature for amateurs and yet I know of no editor who has printed the works of so many young and previously unknown writers as Lorimer has, and know of no editor who is more warmly enthusiastic over a good piece of work than he is. He will accept a good yarn by a new writer just as quickly as he will decline a bad one by an old and famous writer, and that is tarnation quick. So far as I am aware he has but one test for a manuscript: if he likes it