With this issue Path starts on the seventh year of life, and the seven past years have been full of action, of work, and of results. We began without an office or capital: it might be said that the business was carried on in a hat at first. Then it moved into a cell or den on Park Row, where no man could enter by the door if the occupant within did not rise to make room for the portal to swing. Subsequently a larger room — cramped in fact — was hired and exultingly then called "commodious" by the factotum. Later back again to Park Row and even more commodious, as the quarters of a bee might seem so, by comparison, to an ant. Then again to larger quarters on Nassau street, until now it expects to move into the Society's permanent house.
So to signalize the event it puts on a new cover, and were subscribers more numerous it might enlarge the number of its pages. But the penalty of independence in business conduct is frequently lack of support from a world that acts on convention and delights in pandering and being pandered to. But it may as well be known that the Path will pander to nothing.
Once more, too, the editor declares he sees no excuse for the existence of this or any other magazine. He wearies of the eternal printing that goes on, for there is nothing new under the sun and we are like squirrels repeating the words spoken by bodies long since dead which were inhabited by ourselves whom now we fail to recognize. But since this is the age of black on white impressed by machinery, we are compelled to publish so that the opportunity of saying the same thing once more to a rebellious and stiff-necked generation shall not be neglected.