IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION

That allusion to the predominance of fiction brings one round to the question of the Public Library. One is constantly reading attacks on these new and most promising institutions, and always these attacks base themselves on the fact that the number of novels taken out was so many times, so many hundred times greater than the number of “serious books.” Follows nonsense about “scrappy” reading, shallowness of the public mind, and so forth. In Great Britain public pomposities take up the strain and deliver large vague, foolish discourses on our intellectual decline. It occurs to none of these people—nothing, indeed, ever does seem to occur to this sort of people—to inquire if a man or woman can get serious reading from a public library. An inspection of a Public Library Catalogue reveals, no doubt, a certain proportion of “serious” books available, but, as a rule, that “serious side” is a quite higgledy-piggledy heap of fragments. Suppose, for example, an intelligent mechanic has a proclivity for economic questions, he will find no book whatever to guide him to what literature there may be upon those questions. He will plunge into the catalogue, and discover perhaps a few publications of the Cobden Club, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty , J. S. Mill’s Autobiography , Ruskin’s Unto This Last, The Statesman’s Year Book for 1895 , and a text-book specially adapted to such and such an examination by the tutors of some Correspondence College. What can you expect from such a supply but a pitiful mental hash? What is the