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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 of forty-one millions comes to over twelve millions.

This significant statement comes from the lips of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, the new English premier, in a speech against the
proposal for preferential tariffs with the colonies, at Perth, on June 5,
1903. Three years has not changed the situation for the better.

Winston Churchill, M.P., puts the situation thus:

    The mass of people are absolutely dependent for the food
    they eat and the material they employ upon supplies of food
    and raw material which reach them mainly from abroad. They
    are dependent on the condition of a crop at one end of the
    world and the state of a market at the other; and yet, upon
    this artificial foundation, through this inestimable
    advantage of unfettered enterprise and of unrestricted
    sea-communication, they have been able to build up a vast
    industrial fabric which it is no exaggeration to say is the
    economic marvel of the world.

In 1904, the amount of merchandise brought into the United Kingdom was
nearly $2,740,000,000. For thirty years England's imports have been
rapidly increasing, while her exports, comparatively speaking, have
remained stationary. The situation can be put in a way readily appreciated
by Americans if we realize that the entire British Isles are smaller than
New Mexico, and yet contain about half as many people as are in the United
States.

It is the foreign trade of Great Britain that is claimed to be the
salvation of the nation. In 1904 this amounted to over $4,600,000,000, and
last year, the figures for which have not yet been published, was the
greatest in oversea trade in the history of the nation.

Sir Henry Fowler, a leader of the Liberals, said, in a recent speech:

    The question of free trade is the greatest which has been
    before the country for the past half century. The young men
    of to-day are absolutely ignorant. They do not know what it
    means and the issues it involves. If the great system of
    free trade were interfered with, if the attempt were
    successful which is being made to reverse the policy of the
    past sixty years on which the overwhelming bulk of political
    economists were united, I foretell for this country a time
    of the greatest disaster. All classes would suffer,
    especially the working class.

Dealing with the question of exports and imports, he pointed out:

    Eighty per cent of what came into Great Britain represented
    raw material necessary for manufactures and food necessary
    for the people. Therefore the prosperity of this country
    depends, not upon its exports, but upon its imports. We are
    free-traders, not for the injury it does others, but in our
    own interests. It is to our advantage to buy cheap. Our
    greatest import is food and the next raw material. We can
    only pay by our own manufactures.


ENGLAND'S DEFENSES, AND WHAT THEY COST.

  It Is Not Military Strength That Makes a
  Country Great, Says Lord Avebury,
  but the Right Use of Power.

That the burden of armament lies heavy on Europe is well understood. It is
not so commonly known that in the last ten years the cost of army and navy
has increased much more rapidly in Great Britain than in any country of
the Continent. The fact is brought out in the _Nineteenth Century_ by Lord
Avebury, who is better known to Americans as Sir John Lubbock. He says:

    In our own case there has been on the army an increase in
    the past ten years of L24,800,000, and on the navy an
    increase of L25,000,000; or, taking the two together, in
    round figures an increase of no less than L50,000,000, of
    which, however, only L39,000,000 is shown in the ordinary
    estimates. In other words, while Italy has increased her
    naval and military expenditures by L1,500,000; Russia,
    L10,800,000; Germany, L8,700,000, and France, L6,000,000, we
    have increased ours L50,000,000. Thus these four great
    countries put together show an increase of L27,000,000,
    while ours by itself is L50,000,000, or nearly double that
    of Russia, Germany, France, and Italy put together. What
    justification have we for this enormous increase?

    I do not wish to exaggerate, nor to maintain that we are
    going down-hill. But our progress has been checked, and if
    we are not wise in time worse will follow.

Lord Avebury's political opponents would argue that the British military
expenditures have been exceptional because the Boer War proved the
country unprepared for any great military undertaking, and necessitated
elaborate efforts. However, the figures are startling, and give point to
Lord Avebury's conclusion:

    We sometimes hear of "Little Englanders." I hope we shall
    not let ourselves be stung into extravagance and war by any
    such taunt. There are many who have strong views as to what
    constitutes the true greatness of a country. It is not
    wealth, but the application of it; not the numbers of the
    people, but their character and wellbeing; not the strength,
    but the use made of it. We do not wish for England the
    dangerous power of dictation or the seductive glamour of
    conquest, but that our people may be happy and contented;
    that we may do what we can to promote the peace, progress,
    and prosperity of mankind, and that we may deserve, even if
    we do not secure, the respect, the confidence, and the
    good-will of other nations.

    Being once more happily at peace with all the world, our
    financial policy should be to reduce expenditure, pay off
   