he buys it. But since he never yet bought one that was suggestive in its tone or that savored of the salacious, I suppose you might say that there was another test too-the test of common decency. I just said he had an enormous capacity for work and I think of a thing which proves it. The "Post" which is the biggest weekly magazine in the world the biggest in size, in circulation and in general influence has a smaller edi-' torial staff than any active weekly magazine in this country has.

Lorimer has no frills and but few fads. He likes double-breasted sack coats, large brunette cigars, his friends, chocolate bonbons, his family, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, three cups of coffee for breakfast, and rhododendrons on his front lawn. He collects Oriental rugs and dinner checks. More dinner checks have passed through his hands than through the hands of any living man. He believes in human beings, "The Saturday Evening Post" and large tips for waiters. He dislikes poor' cooking, posers, and persons who try

to slip across clandestine free ads in the guise of literary contributions. He might have been a pork-packing baron but chose to take up writing for a trade. When by virtue of three or four books he had become the most widely-read and the most widelyquoted humorous writer in the country, he quit writing to take over the management of an elderly and indisposed magazine and to build it up into a world-beating success. He has shown that a great business man can be a great writer and that a great writer can be a great editor. He is still a great business man and some day he may choose to show the world that he still is a great writer. There is plenty of time-he being yet on the sunny side of his fifty-first birthday.

The almost uncanny soundness of his literary judgment is demonstrated, firstly, by the fact that more people on this planet read his magazine and like it-than read any other magazine, and secondly, by the fact that he buys nearly everything I write. Need I say more?

I. THE EXTENT AND CHARACTER
OF PUBLICATIONS

It is a far cry from these days, when governmental expenditures are measured in billions of dollars, to the afternoon a little more than a century ago, when our congressional our congressional forefathers seriously debated whether they should expend $10,000 of the public funds for printing a message from President Jefferson. The discussion, which ended with the solemn record of a yea and nay vote resulted affirmatively. Even then the spell of the printing-press was upon Congress. Today the printed word is so large a factor in our governmental affairs that the national coat-of-arms should be a printing-press rampant and a bulky volume properly impaled. Thus would be visualized the wise remark of a long-forgotten statesman on the floor of Congress, that the information conveyed through public printing is the basic element of the law-making power. "Public printing", observed this philosopher, "underlies your armies; it underlies your navies, and every other arm of national service." Never were these words truer than at the present time.

Uncle Sam's publishing house, officially known as the Government Printing Office, is the greatest establishment of its kind in the world, private or public. There is nothing to compare with it anywhere. Only three other nations-France, Austria and Holland undertake governmental publication, Great Britain still rely

ing upon private enterprise. Our own institution has not reached its present vast proportions with undue suddenness. It is not a Jonah's gourd, for it has been a century or more in the making. Its beginnings were small enough, going back to the days of Washington's presidency, when "firewood, stationery and printing" were oddly grouped together in an authorization for the expenditure of $10,000.

It was not until 1818, however, when the cost of public printing had reached the then appalling magnitude of $65,000 a year, that Congress realized that the problem of federal printing required solution. In that year some one boldly suggested that a national printing office ought to be established. The idea was far ahead of the times. As late as 1840 a measure which proposed a federal printing office was reported adversely in the Senate on the ground that a government press never should be permitted, even though it was financially advantageous, because its creation would embody "a theory abhorrent alike to the genius of our free institutions and the principles of democracy". Because of this sentiment, and because ideas then filtered slowly through the public mind, as they do now, nearly a quarter of a century elapsed before the recommendation was carried into effect.

In the meantime, Congress undertook many experiments. First, it endeavored to get along with official

printers for the Senate and House of Representatives, duly elected by ballot. The men thus chosen were, with one exception, not printers, but recognized political partisans. Consequently, when the Whigs were in the majority, Gales and Seaton were the fortunate purveyors, to be displaced by Blair and Rives when the Democrats were in control. The position carried both money and prestige, and Congress sometimes devoted entire days to the settlement of the momentous question. Indeed, bitter feeling was frequently manifested, for one of the debates actually resulted in a challenge to a duel from Senator King, of Alabama, to Henry Clay. Happily the difficulty was amicably adjusted.

Perhaps it was this almost tragic incident which led Congress to decide that the profit of printing should not be a matter of political favor, but that the contract should be awarded to the lowest bidder, with the additional precaution that the bids should be opened in the presence of the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House. This plan remained in force six years and was then abandoned, being unsatisfactory to the government and ruinous to the contractors. In 1852 the office of Superintendent of Printing was created, Horace Greeley and Henry J. Raymond being among the unsuccessful candidates. Congress then bought its own paper and paid the printers according to a fixed scale. As the latter was most generous, the public printing soon developed into an expensive luxury.

With the outbreak of the Civil War the demands of the government had increased to such an extent that no single plant in Washington was capable of handling all the printing required. A multiplicity of printers produced a heterogeneous description

of documents and reports, all differing in form and appearance, and in addition there was a vexatious delay in delivery. Congress cut the Gordian knot by purchasing the printing office of Cornelius Wendell, situated at the corner of North Capitol and H Streets a four-story building which is still standing and is the original Government Printing Office. For the structure and its contents, which included twenty-six presses and twenty tons of type, Congress paid $135,000. Today the Government Printing Office -including a new building that cost $2,500,000-has a floor space of thirteen acres, with nearly 150 presses, 246 type-setting machines, by far the largest battery of composing machines. in the world; a complete bindery equipment and an electrotype foundry capable of turning out 2,000 electrotypes each day. There are nearly 1,500,000 plates stored in one vault. The metal-melting room, where the type set on the machines is recast into ingots, handles approximately twelve tons of metal daily. Within the building printing ink and carbon-paper are manufactured; and sixteen elevators, a refrigerating plant and an emergency hospital are installed. In the latter institution nearly four thousand cases were treated last year. Altogether, the modest plant of fifty years ago now represents an investment of considerably over $10,000,000.

To thoroughly appreciate the extent to which Uncle Sam occupies the publication field one must think in terms of millions-not merely millions of dollars but millions of books and pamphlets. Throughout the twenty-four hours of the day and night more than five thousand employees manipulate the hundreds of type-setting machines, run presses which print tons upon tons of white paper and bind moun

ponderous volumes and it is rarely that any report of a cabinet officer and his subordinates can be condensed into one, two or even three volumes. The reports of investigating commissions are always bulky. It required forty-nine volumes to present the work of the Monetary Commission and nineteen volumes to set forth all that had been learned regarding child labor. There were nine volumes of the tariff hearings in the Sixtieth Congress, while the more recent paper and pulp inquiry was followed by the publication of six volumes. The cost of congressional printing last year was a little over $2,000,000.

The departmental grist consists of matter which is not submitted to Congress and covers a wide range. Some idea of the quantity of material produced by the government may be gathered from the fact that the number of its publications for two years required a catalogue of 1,830 pages, quarto size. The cost of printing this catalogue was $7,000.

Even a cursory glance at this presentation leads to bewilderment. There is an embarrassment of riches. The procession of titles, almost interminable, gives emphasis to the following quotation from an official pamphlet:

A general price list, giving in one volume the titles and prices of all the United States public documents that are offered for sale by the Superintendent of Documents, is not practicable. It would fill a book somewhere near the size of Webster's Dictionary.

While the official self-restraint disclosed in this paragraph seems worthy of all commendation, one wonders how it came to be exercised and how this modern printing Moloch was content to substitute merely sixty-eight separate catalogues for a volume of dictionary size. Each one of these relates to a different subject, with many

of them covering scores of pages and specifying thousands of titles. The subjects take a wide range and include astronomy, birds and wild animals, Indians, weather, American history and biography, roads, chemistry, insects, fishes, laws, army and navy, engineering and surveying, organized militia, mines and mining, forestry, foreign affairs, labor, geography and exploration, foods and cooking, political science, finance, education-these being only one-third of the topics upon which the government has issued volumes.

Take, for instance, the subject of education. Its catalogue covers fiftyone closely printed pages. The list comprises a library in itself, for the items which specify the number of pages-and in scores of publications this detail is omitted-represent 74,909 pages of printed matter. Multiply these figures by the thousands of copies of each book or pamphlet issued and the result is monumental, to say nothing of applying the same process to the other sixty-seven catalogues. The thoroughness with which the government has covered the educational field is impressive. From the first title, "Abnormal Man", a book of 445 pages, obtainable either in paper or cardboard cover, to the last book in the list, pertaining to an educational survey of Wyoming, there is afforded a most extensive range of reading.

The motion-picture lover can learn how his favorite recreation has been seriously treated as an aid to education. The student of educational affairs in Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Denmark, or any other country can be surfeited with facts and figures. If the question of mental fatigue in the schools is disturbing him, discussions of the subject by American and English educators