ent, than of the history
full of "things that are not so," of the biased biography, of science
"popularized" out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories in
sociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading as
philosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers and
pseudo-naturalists.

In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate.
One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result is
the same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction. One may
thus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics--the
mathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he does
exist--and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is
that fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have to warn
the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any more
than we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears,
or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fiction
has the fatal gift of being too entertaining. The novel-writer must be
interesting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not often
regard it as necessary--unless he happens to be a Frenchman.

But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit
that the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least in
so far as he deals with the adult reader. We furnish parks and playgrounds
for our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful,
but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess--that a man
may not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels
that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent in
supporting his family. So in the library we may and do see that harmful
literature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books which
are not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess.

I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude about
the large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises from
our misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon the
attention in a state of society where public education and public taste
are on the increase. In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven in
different departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities;
so that discrepancies frequently present thems