The base text of the original item is in the public domain. The text encoding and editorial notes were created and/or prepared by the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Any reuse of the material should credit the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.
A friend of mine handed me a copy THE BASIS, your new journal, the other day, and I have hastened to place myself in the list of subscribers. The form in which the Basis appears is neat and convenient, and the principles and policy of the new journal are just what would be expected with you at its head. You are the one writer in the United States who ought to have an organ of his own, in which to express his views fully and freely; and I venture to hope that your present arrangement will give full scope to your editorial powers, with greater profit and less risk than your plan as at first proposed.
I see that you make most liberal offers of prizes for literary efforts. I trust they will be productive of the best results, both in quality of the work drawn out and in the increase of the circulation of the BASIS. If I can find time between now and the limit fixed for the close of the competitions, I may take a "shy" at one of the prizes. In the meantime I will do all I can to promote the circulation of the BASIS; I already have the promise of several subscriptions.