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 398 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the Western News Co. has not been an aid in establishing west- ern literary periodicals.

Within the five years following the close of the Civil War, a periodical was started in Chicago which stands today as the most notable in the city's literary history. This was a monthly maga- zine which, crudely begun as the Western Monthly, became the classic Lakeside Monthly. Of all the periodicals undertaken in Chicago, the Lakeside Monthly remains the one most distinctive in unalloyed literary appeal, the one most chaste and finished in form. Its history is rich in significance.

In its first number the Western Monthly announced that it was "intended to be purely an institution of the West." The western tocsin was again sounded lustily as in the Western Magazine of prairie days. The worth of the magazines of the East during the preceding decades in affording an outlet for eastern writers, and thereby placing American literature side by side with the best of the Old World, was loudly praised ; but, said the announcement,

the West, with her vast resources, her intellectual men and growing genius, is not represented by any magazine whose mission is to explore the fields of literature and gather the ripe fruits of her pioneer talent.

It was declared that western writers looked with an " unbecoming awe " upon those of the East, and " feared to compete with them in the literary arena as then established." The fault was laid at the door of the West for not publishing a magazine of its own. Hence the advent of the Western Monthly and the concluding words :

We believe the proverbial go-aheaditiveness of the western people will be demonstrated in literary as well as commercial matters, now that the oppor- tunity is presented.

All this appeared in the number of January, 1869.

Not long before that time, Mr. Francis Fisher Browne, truly a pioneer of American culture then and today, arrived in Chicago, coming from Buffalo and the East, by steamer on the lakes. Mr. Browne had served in the Civil War with a Massachusetts regi- ment ; and, having seen many men from many sections marching to the nation's common battlefields, he had come out of the war