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September 10, 2003, 9:45 a.m. The Magazine Without the Paper! Get Digital.

mong the decorations at Evelyn Waugh's house in Combe Florey was a set of three paintings titled "The Pleasures of Travel, 1751, 1851, 1951." The first picture shows the interior of a stage-coach into which a masked highwayman has just burst, wielding a pistol. (One of the passengers has surreptitiously pulled out a pistol of his own, and it looks as though the highwayman's career is about to come to an abrupt end.) The second picture is of a 19th-century railroad carriage, the travelers serene and comfortable, a uniformed porter looking solicitously in through the window. These first two pictures were by the Victorian painter Robert Musgrave Joy.

The third picture, which Waugh commissioned from his contemporary Richard Eurich, shows the cabin of a passenger plane at the moment when something has gone wrong. One of the passengers has been thrown from her seat; the others wear expressions of terror; a white-faced stewardess is trying to comfort an infant.

When he showed people round his house, Waugh liked to pause at these pictures, point to the third one, and say with a merry chuckle: "They are doomed, all doomed!"

Waugh was here expressing the attitude of an English conservative towards technological change.* It was an attitude he carried with him like a shield. He submitted manuscripts to his publisher in longhand decades after other writers had switched to typescript (Mark Twain was the first, I believe); and when, in late middle age, he found that he had become slightly deaf, instead of having a hearing aid fitted, Waugh purchased an antique ear trumpet, which he took great pleasure in deploying at dinner parties, to the annoyance and bafflement of his guests.

This tendency exists in American conservatism, too. I should not be very surprised to see Jeff Hart show up at a National Review editorial meeting wielding an ear trumpet. In the generality, though, American conservatism is much more accepting of technological change than the British variety. American conservatives are American, which means, among other things, that we have a disposition towards meritocracy and optimism. The meritocratic temper inclines us to respect and admire the person clever enough to come up with a useful new gadget; our optimism tells us that whatever problems may come along with an innovation, they will no doubt all be solved in short order.

It is in that forward-looking spirit that we welcomed the Internet and set up National Review Online — one of the earliest and most successful political webzines. And now it is in that same spirit that we introduce the online image of our paper magazine, National Review. The difference between the two is, and will remain, considerable. Though both are witty, well-informed, and wide-ranging, the print magazine surveys the world from a loftier viewpoint, dealing as it must with two weeks worth of events at a time. NRO will continue to give a daily perspective — brisker, breezier, closer to the quick-fire irreverent spirit of the blogosphere.

If you have never been a subscriber to National Review — can't afford it, or feel you already have too many paper publications coming into your mailbox — I urge you to give the web image a try. It's the same copy, with the same features, including all those odd quirks and corners (poems, cartoons, humor pieces) that make readers feel they are part of a family of like-minded souls — and for less money! You'll be able to read sharp one-paragraph snippets of news in "The Week" (which I have not yet succeeded in persuading the editors to rename "The Fortnight"), and long thoughtful essays by major historians, philosophers, jurists, and litterateurs, and everything in between. Why would you not subscribe to National Review on the web? I cannot imagine.

* Though not, I have always thought, very consistently. If a person who grew up with railroads should deplore planes, why should not a person who grew up with stage-coaches deplore railroads? I think Waugh would have argued that we ought to resist those innovations that tend to undermine the kind of social order — hierarchical, based on rank — that conservatives like himself believed in, and applaud the others; and that planes are of the first kind, trains of the second.