Advance has sold astonishingly well, and its second number, a little cheekier than the first, is nearly at the newsstands. The magazine finds itself already in its adolescence, whose oddities are far less easy to forgive than those of early childhood, and whose pretensions are often very cruelly snubbed. In this case they should be snubbed. Advance is moving too fast over the largely unexplored and extremely boggy ground of liberal Republicanism, and if its editors are at all bothered by doubt about the nature and quality of the soil, they betray none of their misgivings.

Indeed, they have apparently ceased altogether to worry about ideology. Bruce Chapman, the publisher, has for the moment settled the problem with a few familiar and comfortable phrases "Republicans seem to understand that the GOP must find imaginative, affirmative answers to current problems," he writes, "answers consonant with our traditional principles, or perish as a major political force."

This is of course hopelessly glib political philosophy, and perhaps they are aware of it. "Sadly," an article states cheerfully, "the very proposition that justifies the Republican criticism [of New Deal economics] is in its usual expression so vague, so wracked with cliches and dogma, that it is virtually useless as a working political program..." Why then, say the editors, let us avoid propositions, devise programs; it is wiser. And so they do, save for their publication of a few nasty, unnecessarily long swipes at the far right. (A Mr. K. T., for example, tells use that he has "nothing in particular against capitalists" but that unlike Ayn Rand he does not "find them an acceptable substitute for God, and would submit that Miss Rand's compulsion to apotheosize them indicates something about the soundness of her thought." Another column, "Retreat," when it is not offensively chatty, is absurdly serious enough to comment that the right-wing magazine New Guard's "analysis of history is shoddy and rather sophomoric." But all this is no integral part of Advance's second-issue soul, and is probably there only because the editors don't wish to be suspected of sympathy toward the imposing Young Americans for Freedom.)

"Working political programs," yes, Advance has dozens of them, placed appealingly on view in five lengthy articles. In "New Jersey Republican Renascence" (ugh) George Gilder talks about former Secretary Mitchell's chances of success in the April 18 primary, decides that they are good, and is glad of it. He wastes a few inches in needless glorification of Mitchell's more irrelevant virtues, but in all the report is strikingly solid and--most important--eminently pragmatic. So it is also with an editorial report on what a Citizen's League is doing in the Kennedy-swept state of Illinois: trying to reform corrupt vote-counting practices and to recruit "attractive and competent candidates for all offices."

Senator John Sherman Cooper gives good reasons for his support of federal aid to education and discusses the various "formulae" for providing it intelligently and without passion. In fact, only two of the program-proposing articles are really disappointing: "Anatomy of a Victory" because it is almost inherently pointless as a post-election-mortem of Ohio, and "An Economic Alternative for the GOP" because, although potentially interesting enough, it only rambles tediously in sketchy recapitulation of the books of Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler.

What else?--there is still more carried in this slim blue frame. (For there are no ads, beyond an announcement that Chapman and Gilder are available for Limited Speaking Engagements.) Morton Halperin of the Center for International Affairs revives the notion of limited war tersely and persuasively; Edward S. Cabot alternates the obvious and the original in a highly irritating fashion in an article on Ghana. And, perhaps inevitably, the editors enjoy a little Democrat-baiting, in Cabot's indictment of Soapy Williams' behavior in Africa, in a collection of silly anecdotes called "The Political Notebook."

Yes, Advance has more or less circuitously discovered its metier; I suspect that as it grows older it will stick to what it does best. To be sure, it must do that better. Without exception, its features are excruciatingly dull, and many, indeed, are wretchedly written. I suppose they will improve. Advance will soon be very rich, they will attract learned and important contributors. The thought that they seem already to have forgotten the larger things they hoped to do is only briefly painful.