[1] His grandfather George Flower had emigrated from England with his friend Morris Birkbeck after speaking with Edward Coles, and with their followers founded the English settlement in the Illinois Territory.

[7] Uniting it all was Flower's evolutionary rather than revolutionary view of social change and his deep-seated faith in the perfectibility of mankind through enlightenment about the world and reasoned response to its problems.

[8] He criticized ostentatious, costly, and encumbering women's clothing, "materialistic commercialism," and the wealthy class which monopolized society's economic resources.

[2] Multiple articles were dedicated to women's suffrage, reform of divorce law, the relationship between poverty and crime, and race relations between the white and black populations of the United States.

Long an advocate of free silver and currency reform, Flower came out strongly for the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan during the heated United States presidential election of 1896.

[11] The year 1896 marked the end of Flower's first stint at the helm of The Arena, with the magazine being transferred to the editorship of historian John Clark Ridpath and the writer Helen Hamilton Gardener.

He was the co-editor of former Unitarian Charles H. Kerr's Chicago magazine The New Time — a forerunner of International Socialist Review — from 1897 to 1898, working with Frederick Upham Adams.

[3] The Arena was sold in 1903 to Charles A. Montgomery, a short-lived ownership situation which abruptly ended in 1904 with the magazine's sale to book publisher Albert Brandt.

[12] Instead, Flower advocated for a "neo-Christianity" based upon the re-establishment of personal character, and the rejection of greed and inequality and its propagation by self-interested men of wealth and their political adjutants.

[12] Social ills were not to be dismissed or ignored however, Flower believed, but rather were matters to be addressed forthrightly, with a broad range of opinions solicited in the process of bringing about their rational solution.

[15] Although initially a skeptic, Flower made note of anecdotal evidence of cases of illness cured through Christian Science-based treatment, which had baffled the medical practitioners of the day.

In 1932, historian C. C. Regier remembered him as a man who "somewhat naively...believed that if people would but see the evil effects of their acts they would themselves mend their ways", a philosophy which led to upbeat and optimistic editorial tone in Flower's work.