it was in the early spring of 1909 that i had a letter from mary.

by that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, gidding and i had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite undertakings. indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their present lines. we had developed a huge publishing establishment with one big printing plant in barcelona and another in manchester, and we were studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment of a third plant in america. our company was an english company under the name of alphabet and mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. its streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm had ever managed to do before. we were reprinting, in as carefully edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the english, spanish and french literature, and we were only waiting for the release of machinery to attack german, russian and italian, and were giving each language not only its own but a very complete series of good translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. we had a little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at each important literary centre. we had, for example, more than a score of men at work translating bengali fiction and verse into english,—a lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent englishman—and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in arabic. we meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere, desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our lists.

ours was to be in the first place a world literature. then afterwards upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant to publish new work and new thought. we were also planning an encyclopædia. behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers, dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping them up to date. it was our intention to make every copy we printed bear the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow margin of profit. then we meant to spread our arms wider, and consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a new world encyclopædia, that should also annually or at longest biennially renew its youth.

so far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of information, and of a kind of gigantic modern bible of world literature, and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and rearrangement. we had branches in china, japan, peru, iceland and a thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off as the moon to an english or american bookseller in the seventies. china in particular was a growing market. we had a subsidiary company running a flourishing line of book shops in the east-end of london, and others in new jersey, chicago, buenos ayres, the south of france, and ireland. incidentally we had bought up some thousands of miles of labrador forest to ensure our paper supply, and we could believe that before we died there would not be a corner of the world in which any book of interest or value whatever would not be easily attainable by any intelligent person who wanted to read it. and already we were taking up the more difficult and ambitious phase of our self-appointed task, and considering the problem of using these channels we were mastering and deepening and supplementing for the stimulation and wide diffusion of contemporary thought.

there we went outside the province of alphabet and mollentrave and into an infinitely subtler system of interests. we wanted to give sincere and clear-thinking[pg 283] writers encouragement and opportunity, to improve the critical tribunal and make it independent of advertising interests, so that there would be a readier welcome for luminous thinking and writing and a quicker explosion of intellectual imposture. we sought to provide guides and intelligencers to contemporary thought. we had already set up or subsidized or otherwise aided a certain number of magazines and periodicals that seemed to us independent-spirited, out-spoken and well handled, but we had still to devise our present scheme of financing groups of men to create magazines and newspapers, which became their own separate but inalienable property after so many years of success.

but all this i hope you will already have become more or less familiar with when this story reaches your hands, and i hope by the time it does so we shall be far beyond our present stage of experiment and that you will have come naturally to play your part in this most fascinating business of maintaining an onward intellectual movement in the world, a movement not simply independent of but often running counter to all sorts of political and financial interests. i tell you this much here for you to understand that already in 1909 and considering the business side of my activities alone, i was a hard worker and very strenuously employed. and in addition to all this huge network of enterprises i had developed with gidding, i was still pretty actively a student. i wasn't—i never shall be—absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. i was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves across europe. i had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book upon "group jealousy in religious persecution, racial conflicts and war" which i hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore i hope you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to you. and moreover rachel and i had established our home in london—in the house we now occupy during the winter and spring—and both you and your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth. your little sister had indeed but just begun.

and then one morning at the breakfast-table i picked a square envelope out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely familiar handwriting of lady mary justin.... the sight of it gave me an odd mixture of sensations. i was startled, i was disturbed, i was a little afraid. i hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to tell me how little i had forgotten....