If the literary reviews, as John Morley said, furnished the best position for observing the fresh-flowing currents of thought in the nineteenth century, then a study of the Fortnightly Review should give one an intimate acquaintance with Mid-Victorian radicalism. For that particular current flowed freshly out of Morley's own review. The men whom he gathered round him represented all shades of advanced Victorian thought: they were Millite Utilitarians, Comtean Positivists, and Darwinian Evolutionists. But whatever the quality of their separate doctrines, they were at one in their humanitarian convictions and in their middle-class faith in human progress. Any study of these men is of necessity a study of the different manifestations of that faith.

"Periodical literature is like the manna in the wilderness," said Morley; "it quickly loses its freshness, and to turn over thirty volumes of old Reviews can hardly be exhilarating at the best." But exhilarating or not, turning over the old numbers of the Fortnightly reveals a novel experiment in journalism. I have tried to describe that experiment, to find out how much success it had, and to summarize the contents and examine the policy of the review during the first ten years of its history. Those particular years were marked by just such interest in social reform as would inspire in humanitarians the freest radical utterance. If I seem to have filled my pages with too copious quotation from the Fortnightly Review, perhaps I may plead the precedent of the many biographies in which the author has conveniently allowed his subject to speak for himself.

In expressing my thanks to Professor Emery Neff of Columbia University for the aid he has given me, I feel that in a way I am also paying a debt to the late Professor . . .