in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly parts. If in monthly parts at
sixpence, the cost to the subscriber would be practically the same as
that of a monthly magazine, only that the reader would accumulate at the
rate of twelve volumes a year--and read at the rate of one a month--the
works of Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Of course much worthless
literature, fiction of the trashiest, has been circulated in the same
way--much more perhaps than of the better class. But even so, the
reading matter was superior to that previously accessible, and the vital
fact still remains that the people acquired the habit of book-reading.

In America, the part thus played by some of the periodical libraries was
of much importance, but it was probably not comparable to the influence
of the ten-cent magazine. In the United States itself, the immense
beneficence of that influence has hardly been appreciated. The magazines
came into vogue, and the people accepted the fact as they accept the
popularity of a new form of "breakfast food." The quickening of the
national intelligence which resulted was no more immediate, no more
readily traceable or conspicuous to the public eye, than would be the
improvement in the national stamina which might result from the
introduction of some new article of diet. A change which takes five or
ten years to work itself out is lost sight of, becomes invisible, amid
the jostling activities of a national life like the American. Moreover,
several causes were contributing to the same end and, had any one
stopped to endeavour to do it, it would not have been at any time easy
to unravel the threads and show what proportion of the fabric was woven
by each; but if it had been possible to affix an intellect-meter to the
aggregate brain of the American people during the last twenty years, of
such ingenious mechanism that it would have shown not only what the
increase in total mental power had been but also what proportions of
that increase were ascribable to the various contributing
causes--education, colonial expansion, commercial growth, ten-cent
magazines, and so forth--and if, further, the "readings" of that meter
could be interpreted into terms of increase in national energy, national
productiveness, national success, I do not think that Parliament would
lose one unnecessary day in passing the legislation necessary to reform
the English postal laws.

* * * * *

One other point is worth