step in the
scheme of creating good citizens by means of free instruction. We teach
the young to read so that both as children and as men and women they may
read. Our teaching must lead to the habit and the desire of reading to
be useful; and only as this result is reached can the work in our free
schools be logically supplemented and made valuable.

Therefore, the same wise policy and intent which open the doors of our
free schools to our young, also suggest the completion of the plan thus
entered upon by placing books in the hands of those who in our schools
have been taught to read.

A man or woman who never reads and is abandoned to unthinking torpor, or
who allows the entire mental life to be bounded by the narrow lines of
the daily recurring routine of effort for mere existence, cannot escape
a condition of barrenness of mind, which not only causes the decay of
individual contentment and happiness, but which fails to yield to the
state its justly expected return of usefulness in valuable service and
wholesome political action.

Another branch of this question should not be overlooked. It is not
only of great importance that our youth and our men and women should
have the ability, the desire, and the opportunity to read, but the kind
of books they read is no less important. Without guidance and without
the invitation and encouragement to read publications which will improve
as well as interest, there is danger that our people will have in their
hands books whose influence and tendency are of a negative sort, if not
positively bad and mischievous. Like other good things, the ability and
opportunity to read may be so used as to defeat their beneficient
purposes.

The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and
blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible to
the young will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards
of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good
order, will certainly not tend to make him a useful member of society.

The man who devotes himself to the flash literature now much too common
will, instead of increasing his value as a citizen, almost surely
degenerate in his ideas of public duty and grow dull in appreciation of
the obligations he owes his country.

In both these cases there will be a loss to the state. There is danger
also that a positive and aggressive injury to the community will result,
and such rea