"The time is new, the challenge is great; we are hopeful." Thus, publisher Michael Straight introduces to the readers of the country's chief liberal periodical a new New Republic, altered in size, content and staff. After much publicity and public comment, ranging from the hallelujahs of the left to the derisive criticisms of the right, Henry Wallace took over the editorship of the weekly magazine last week "to help organize a progressive America."

Most interesting to a student of public opinion and the American press is the question of the degree of appeal which such a combination will have for the nation's reading public. As compared with the original NR, this appeal is great. The drawings and cartoons which are interspersed throughout the magazine; the addition of such well-known writers as Vincent Sheean and Teodore H. ("Thunder Out of China") White; the more striking cover--all should serve to increase its popularity. Lessor-known, but highly competent journalists, including UN news-covering Jane Bedell and a former Newsweek editor Thomas Whiteside, have been added as assistant editors.

Politically, NR's leaning is still frankly left-of-center. It makes no pretense of maintaining an ivory-tower impartiality in its presentation of a liberal's eye view of the world scene. But that this view represents no political party or line or combination of the two is affirmed by Wallace in his five-page introductory editorial. He rejects those "Dichards of the Right" who cannot conceive of jobs for all in our present society and those "Diehards of the Left (who) maintain that freedom must be sacrificed for the sake of jobs and peace." Instead, he, ergo the New Republic, stands for one idea: "that jobs, peace and freedom can be attained together and can make possible One World . . . within our lifetime."

Although the technical and departmental innovations are neither so newsworthy nor so politically significant as the magazine's new editor, they are nonetheless vital to its success or failure. A "Farm" column has been added, for example, demonstrating the extent of influence which NR's executives hope their publication will achieve. And many more changes are promised.

Who will benefit more by this happy marriage--Wallace in his desire to have a vehicle from which he can launch his fight anew for "the Roosevelt tradition," or the New Republic in its need to boost circulation and become in itself the leading progressive force in American literary life? But important though this question may be, it is to many practical observers secondary to the still-unanswered, fundamental issue--that of whether Wallace's common men will come to the support of this new venture in enough numbers to make his voice a weekly boom in their behalf.