Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/91

1868.]

s I may have occasion in these pages to advance certain opinions perhaps scarcely worthy of being dignified as the expression of plural wisdom, I shall always use the first person, singular. Generally I think the average reader is not deceived by the editorial plural. We do not, I observe, accept objectionable doctrine any the quicker for it. On the contrary, we are very apt to say: "That's Smith—everybody knows he's incited by jealousy," or "Jones got his price for that article." Perhaps Jones did; perhaps we get our price for opposing Jones' views; but that is neither here nor there. I simply meant to say that in this department of the there is nothing oracular—nothing but the expression of an individuality, generally inexact, rarely positive, and certainly never authoritative.

Yet it falls to my lot at the very outset, to answer, on behalf of 'the publishers, a few questions that have arisen in the progress of this venture. Why, for instance, is this magazine called "The Overland Monthly?" It would perhaps be easier to say why it was not called by some of the thousand other titles suggested. I might explain how "Pacific Monthly" is hackneyed, mild in suggestion, and at best but a feeble echo of the Boston "Atlantic;" how the "West," "Wide West" and "Western" are already threadbare and suggest to Eastern readers only Chicago and the Lakes; how "Occidental " and "Chrysopolis" are but cheap pedantry, and "Sunset," "Sundown," "Hesper," etc., cheaper sentiment; how "California,"—honest and direct enough—is yet too local to attract any but a small number of readers. I might prove that there was safety, at least, in the negative goodness of our present homely Anglo-Saxon title. But is there nothing more? Turn your eyes to this map made but a few years ago. Do you see this vast interior basin of the Continent, on which the boundaries of States and Territories are less distinct than the names of wandering Indian tribes; do you see this broad zone reaching from Virginia City to St. Louis, as yet only dotted by telegraph stations, whose names are familiar, but of whose locality we are profoundly ignorant? Here creeps the railroad, each day drawing the West and East closer together. Do you think, O owner of Oakland and San Francisco lots, that the vast current soon to pour along this narrow channel will be always kept within the bounds you have made for it? Will not this mighty Nilus overflow its banks and fertilize the surrounding desert? Can you ticket every passenger through to San Francisco—to Oakland—to Sacramento—even to Virginia City? Shall not the route be represented as well as the termini? And where our people travel, that is the highway of our thought. Will the trains be freighted only with merchandize, and shall we exchange nothing but goods? Will not our civilization gain by the subtle inflowing current of Eastern refinement, and shall we not, by the same channel, throw into Eastern exclusiveness something of our own breadth and liberality? And if so, what could be more appropriate for the title of a literary magazine than to call it after this broad highway?

The bear who adorns the cover may be "an ill-favored" beast whom "women cannot abide," but he is honest withal. Take him if you please as the symbol of local primitive barbarism. He is crossing the track of the Pacific Railroad, and has paused a moment to look at the coming engine of civilization and progress—which moves like a good many other engines of civilization and progress with a prodigious shrieking and puffing—and apparently recognizes his rival and his doom. And yet, leaving the symbol out, there is much about your grizzly that is pleasant. The truth should however be tested at a moment when no desire for self-preservation prejudices the observer. In his placid moments he has a stupid, good-natured, grey tranquility, like that of the hills in midsummer. I am satisfied that his unpleasant habit of scalping