omain of scientific literature is apparent
enough. Such literature contributes facts which are the data for action.
But novels in general belong to the literature of power. Their purpose
is not to furnish information but to give pleasure. Literature of this
sort adds no new fact, nor is it superseded, nor does it lose any of its
value by lapse of time. To assume that it does would be to assume that
beauty of form could become obsolete. This is not so in painting, in
sculpture, in architecture; why should it be so in prose fiction, in
poetry, in the drama? Was there, in fact, an aesthetic value in the
Canterbury Tales in 1380, in Hamlet in 1602, in Ivanhoe in 1819, that is
not to be found in them in 1898?

But a large portion of latter day fiction is fiction with a purpose;
another way of saying that it is a work of art composed for the
dissemination of doctrine. This element promotes it at once to the
dignity of a treatise; a new view of politics, a new criticism of social
conditions, a new creed! Here is something that concerns the student of
sociology. And surely his needs are worthy of prompt response.

In fact, his needs and the general curiosity do get prompt response, and
the new novels are freely bought. How freely I have recently sought to
ascertain. I asked of some seventy libraries their yearly expenditure
for current fiction in proportion to their total expenditure for books.
The returns show an average of from ten to fifteen per cent. In one case
the amount reached fifty per cent., in others it fell as low as two per
cent. The ratio for fiction in general is much higher on the average;
but fiction in general includes Scott and Thackeray and other standards,
an ample supply of which would not usually be questioned. At Providence
and Worcester, two of the most active and popular of public libraries,
the purchases of fiction, current and standard, formed last year but
seven and eleven per cent., respectively, of the entire expenditure for
books.

At Boston there were selected but 178 titles of current fiction (out of
nearly 600 read and considered). But some dozen copies were bought of
each title, so that the entire purchases reached 2,300 volumes and cost
about $2,300. This was about six and a half per cent. on a total
expenditure for books of $34,000. At St. Louis the practise is to buy
but two copies out of the general funds to be circulated free. Nearly a
hundred more are added which are rented out and th