What is
true of books in more than one volume is presumably also true, although
perhaps in a less degree, of one-volume works, although we have no means
of showing it directly. Among the readers of every book, then, there are
generally some who, for one reason or other, do not read it to the end.
Our question, "Do readers read?" is thus answered in the negative for a
large number of cases. The supplementary question, "Why do not readers
read?" occurs at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rather
too deeply into psychology. Whether this tendency to leave the latter part
of books unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating the
present investigation at intervals of a year or more. The probability is
that it is due to pure lack of interest. For some reason or other, many
persons begin to read books that fail to hold their attention. In a large
number of cases this is doubtless due to a feeling that one "ought to
read" certain books and certain classes of books. A sense of duty carries
the reader part way through his task, but he weakens before he has
finished it.

This shows how necessary it is to stimulate one's general interest in a
subject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculated
to arouse and sustain that interest. Possibly the modern newspaper habit,
with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in producing
the general result, and doubtless a careful detailed investigation would
reveal still other partial causes, but the chief and determining cause
must be lack of interest. And it is to be feared that instead of taking
measures to arouse a permanent interest in good literature, which would in
itself lead to the reading of standard works and would sustain the reader
until he had finished his task, we have often tried to replace such an
interest by a fictitious and temporary stimulus, due to appeals to duty,
or to that vague and confused idea that one should "improve one's mind,"
unaccompanied by any definite plan of ways and means. There is no more
powerful moral motor than duty, but it loses its force when we try to
apply it to cases that lie without the province of ethics. The man who has
no permanent interest in historical literature, and who is impelled to
begin a six-volume history because he conceives it to be his "duty" to
read it, is apt to conclude, before he has finished the second volume,
that his is a case where inclination (or in this instan