ad for reading's sake--they are willing to read the books one ought to
read. They are moved by considerations of mental improvement independent
of any result beyond the improvement itself. The library as a library
attracts them. Then, too, the amount of their reading and its character
is modified by the fact that women are so much more limited than men in
means to pass their leisure. Jerome K. Jerome (if correctly reported by
newspapers) recently pointed out that much so-called reading is no more
an intellectual process than is smoking a cigar, and that often we go to
books just as to the cigar, to pass the time and to prevent the
intrusion of disagreeable thoughts. Of course this is, and ought to be,
wholly true, and since with us the cigar is a masculine privilege, the
woman must take to books as the man takes to smoking, and even to
drinking. Speaking seriously, the library is to many women a relief from
care--the only distraction from the monotony of routine. It is a cheap
and easy thing to sneer at this use of books, but we who believe in the
friendship of books know that here lies one of the greatest blessings
they can give, as it is one of the greatest blessings of true
friendship. Nor do we wonder that the uncultivated, or the
half-cultivated, often choose their book friends from a class not
greatly above their own.

On the other hand, women have hardly begun to use books on lines along
which we are seeking to get men to read--in directions connected with
their trade or profession. Domestic industries, so far as they are in
the hands of women, are still most wholly dependent upon tradition. They
are not exposed to competition. Failure or inefficiency does not put the
proprietor out of business. Their results are not measured in dollars
and cents. In a word, the whole line of motives which is forcing
masculine industries over to the basis of books is lacking in the chief
feminine occupations. We are now seeing only the feeble beginnings of
the attempt thus to transfer them from tradition to science. A long time
must pass, and social conditions greatly change, before the transfer is
made. Thus women are not forced from general to special lines of
reading, while they have greater motive for general reading than have
men.

As a result, women are becoming, to a degree without example in the
past, the possessors and transmitters of the life of culture. I do not
believe that fewer men read good literature than formerl