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            THE SCRAP BOOK.

  Vol. I.    MARCH, 1906.    No. 1.




Something New in Magazine Making.


THE SCRAP BOOK will be the most elastic thing that ever happened, in the
way of a magazine--elastic enough to carry anything from a tin whistle to
a battle-ship. This elasticity is just what we should have in
magazine-making, but it is precisely what we do not have and cannot have
in the conventional magazine, such, for example, as _The Century_,
_Harper's_, MUNSEY'S, and _McClure's_.

A certain standard has grown up for these magazines that gives the editor
comparatively little latitude. Custom has decreed that they shall carry
nothing but original matter, and that it shall be dignified and
tremendously magaziny--so magaziny, in fact, that often it is as juiceless
as a dried lemon.

To republish, in successive issues of a magazine of this type, a
considerable proportion of the gems of the past, or the best things
printed in current publications, or to swing away recklessly from
convention in the illustrations and make-up, would be to switch the
magazine out of its class and into some other which the public would not
accept as standard.

In THE SCRAP BOOK we shall be bounded by no such restrictions, no
restrictions of any kind that come within the scope of good journalism.
With our average of two hundred pages of reading matter, we shall carry
the biggest cargo of real, human-interest reading matter that has ever
been carried by any magazine in the wide world.

In size alone it will be from forty to eighty pages larger than the
standard magazines, and by reason of the fact that its space is not taken
up by illustrations, and that we use a smaller, though perfectly distinct
type, the number of words in THE SCRAP BOOK will be a good deal more than
double that contained in these other magazines.

With such a vast amount and such a wide variety of reading, there is
something in THE SCRAP BOOK for every human being who knows how to read
and cares at all to read. Everything that appeals to the human brain and
human heart will come within the compass of THE SCRAP BOOK--fiction, which
is the backbone of periodical circulation; biography, review, philosophy,
science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird, the
mystical--everything that can be classified and everything that cannot be
classified. A paragraph, a little bit, a saying, an editorial, a joke, a
maxim, an epigram--all these will be comprised in the monthly budget of
THE SCRAP BOOK. We are starting off with four good serial stories, and
next month another will be added, and then another, so that we can
maintain an average of six.

There isn't anything in the world just like THE SCRAP BOOK--nothing, in
fact, that compares with it at all. There are review magazines, and small
weekly reviews, and there are, or have been, eclectic magazines; but never
before has anything been attempted on the scale and magnitude of this
magazine. It is an idea on which we have been working for several years,
and for which we have been gathering materials. We have bought hundreds
and hundreds of scrap books from all over the country, some of them a
century old, and are still buying them. From these books we are gathering
and classifying an enormous number of gems, and facts and figures, and
historical and personal bits that are of rare value.

Furthermore, we have a corps of people ransacking libraries, reading all
the current publications, the leading daily papers, and digging out
curious and quaint facts and useful facts and figures from reference
books, cyclopedias, etc., etc.

This first number is but the beginning of what we have in mind for THE
SCRAP BOOK. It is so voluminous in the number of its words, and so varied
in its subjects, that in arrangement and matter it necessarily falls short
of the perfected magazine at which we are aiming. Our purpose, in a word,
is to give more first-rate reading, on a wide variety of subjects, for our
great big eighty millions of people than has ever before been presented in
any single periodical, and to give this magazine at the people's
price--the nimble dime.

  FRANK A. MUNSEY.




The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While

    James J. Hill Warns America of Dangers that Threaten Her
    Future--Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Avebury Deal
    with the Questions of the Day in England--Dr. Martin
    Predicts a Great Awakening in China--Governor Folk Foresees
    the Downfall of "Graft"--Lewis Nixon Speaks of What He Saw
    in Russia--Dr. Osler Explains His Philosophy of
    Life--Russell Sage Gives Some Practical Advice--With Other
    Striking Expressions of Opinion from People of National or
    International Reputation.

_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.


THE COMING TEST OF AMERICAN RESOURCES.

  James J. Hill, Seeing Trouble Ahead,
  Warns His Fellow Countrymen That
  There Are Dangers to Be Met.

At last James J. Hill--the silent railroad king of the Northwest, has
given us his full and free opinion on the business policy of the United
States. Throughout his long career it has been his plan to "say nothing
and saw wood." He has been too busy to talk. The man who plunges into a
dense wilderness, as he did, and transforms it into four or five
prosperous States, has no time to run a public opinion factory.

But recently, while at a gathering of his friends in St. Paul, Mr. Hill
unlocked his tongue and spoke out. It was a remarkable address, made by a
remarkable man, and the meat of it was as follows:

    The nation at large feels that it is immensely prosperous.
    We are cutting a wide swath; there is no doubt of it. But if
    we will get down closer and examine what we are doing, we
    will find that we are living profligately and squandering
    our heritage in every possible manner.

    We should insist upon better cultivation of the land. For on
    that one item depends your future growth and prosperity, and
    there is no other item to which you can look; no other
    source of wealth than that which comes out of the
    cultivation of the soil.

    If the soil is protected, if it is intelligently handled, if
    your crops are properly rotated, if the land is fertilized
    and rested and treated with proper care, you have a mine in
    the soil that will never be exhausted; quite unlike the
    other mine.

    The millions and hundreds of millions of dollars coming into
    the Northwest from the annual crops, while it is large,
    isn't half as large as it ought to be.


    Our Free Lands Are Gone.

    Our public domain is exhausted. Last year over a million
    people came from across the Atlantic to the United States,
    and the natural increase certainly is a million and a half
    more. What is to become of these people? They are to be
    driven fairly into the factories and workshops and no place
    else.

    They can leave our country and go to the Canadian Northwest,
    as many have gone. But that country will be populated to its
    extent very soon, much sooner than you think. It has not an
    unlimited area.

    Try and cast your mind twenty or twenty-five years ahead. At
    that time we should have one hundred and fifty or one
    hundred and sixty millions of people. Where are they going?
    Who is going to feed them? They can manufacture. We have
    the raw material. We have the coal and the iron and the
    copper and the lead. They can manufacture. Who will buy it?

    We have got to a point where we are selling our heritage; we
    are selling our rich deposits of iron and our coal and our
    rich soil, and exhausting it as well.

    People of other countries are exercising the utmost, closest
    intelligence in everything that pertains to economy in
    production. Take, for instance, the German nation to-day,
    and they lead the world or any period in the history of the
    world in industrial intelligence and industrial management.


    Competition Grows Fiercer.

    I was in England in November, and met a sad sight--Trafalgar
    Square filled with idle people, large numbers of idle people
    asking for bread up around Hyde Park. Why? The men who carry
    on the work, who paid the pay-rolls, are no longer engaged
    in the business.

    What they had they have turned into money, and have bought
    securities or something else, trying to save what they have
    got.

    In the west of England, which was a great center of
    broadcloth manufacturing and of woolen goods, their output
    is less than a quarter of what it was twenty-five years ago.
    Germany is selling cutlery in Sheffield.

    And I took pains to look around London, and to walk into the
    shops and find out. I couldn't buy a pair of lisle-thread
    gloves that were not made in Germany. Underclothing,
    stockings, cloth, almost everything made in Germany. They
    have a system of education in Germany. They educate their
    men.

    Now I am not going to undertake to say that their way is
    better than ours, but I want to impress this on you, that
    when this country has a hundred and fifty million people
    they have got to do something; they have got to earn a
    living.

    Who will buy the goods? Who will employ them? In what shape
    are they to meet the competition that England is meeting
    to-day? And a million and a half of idle men asking for
    bread in England, and no bread for them except such as
    charity doles out. They have got to be carried out of Great
    Britain and a new place found for them. There is no other
    solution.

    It is all well enough to talk about what we are doing.
    Examine it closely and you will find that we are doing
    nothing except selling our natural resources and exhausting
    them. When you dig a ton of ore out of the ground you can't
    plant another ton, as you could potatoes; it is gone. And
    when the fertility of our fields, the fertility of the soil
    is gone, where are we going to replace it from?


    Teach the Boys to Work.

    I am not going to find fault with education; it never hurt
    anybody. But if, in place of spending so much time and so
    much money on languages and higher studies, we fitted them
    for the life that they are going to follow, for the sphere
    in which they are going to move, we would do more for them.

    I know that in two or three, more or less, railroads in
    which I am interested, the pay-rolls cover eighty to ninety
    thousand people. We have tried all manner of young
    men--college men, high-school men, and everything else--and
    I will take a boy at fifteen years old who has to make a
    living--his chances will be better if he has to contribute
    to the support of a widowed mother--I will take him and make
    a man of him, and get him in the first place, before you
    would get most of the others to enter the race with him;
    simply because he has to work. He has to work, he has the
    spur of necessity; he must work.

    If there be anything that you can do, I feel sure that you
    will all put your hands to the plow and help; but you will
    never build a city faster than you have a country to support
    it. And that is the first and the most important thing.


FREE TRADE IS VITAL TO GREAT BRITAIN.

  Sir Henry Fowler Says that an Import
  Tax Upon Food Would Be Ruinous
  to the English People.

Free Trade, which has been the policy of England for sixty years, is again
on trial, and the battle waxes fierce. There is a growing effort to work
in the thin wedge of "a moderate tariff, not protective but defensive,"
but the opposition are fighting it with every weapon in their armory of
protest. England to-day is not self-supporting, her rural industries have
been declining for years, and the country receives from abroad the far
larger quantity of its food and raw material.

Thirty per cent of the people are underfed and on the verge of hunger.
Thirty per cent