the enlargement of the
moral vision. The great need in modern culture, which is scientific
in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to
find some effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. That
is the business and function of literature. Literature alone will not
make a good citizen; it will not make a good man. History affords too
many proofs that scholarship and learning by no means purge men of
acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, of a murderous tenacity about
trifles. Mere scholarship and learning and the knowledge of books do
not by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling acids of the
human system. Nor would I pretend for a moment that literature can be
any substitute for life and action. Burke said, "What is the education
of the generality of the world? Reading a parcel of books? No!
Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and of justice, these are
what form the education of the world." That is profoundly true; it is
life that is the great educator. But the parcel of books, if they are
well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline; they interpret this
virtue and justice; they awaken within us the diviner mind, and rouse
us to a consciousness of what is best in others and ourselves.

As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us question whether the
spread of literature, as now understood, does awaken the diviner mind.
The numbers of the books that are taken out from public libraries are
not all that we could wish. I am not going to inflict many figures on
you, but there is one set of these figures that distresses
booklovers,--I mean the enormous place that fiction occupies in the
books that are taken out. In one great town in the North prose fiction
forms 76 per cent of all the books lent. In another great town prose
fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 per cent; and in a fourth 67 per
cent. I had the curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the
United States; and there--supposing the system of cataloguing and
enumeration to be the same--they are a trifle more serious in their
taste than we are; where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place
like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In Scotland, too, it ought to
be said that they have a better average in respect to prose fiction.
There is a larger demand for books called serious than in England. And I
suspect, though I do not know, that one reason why there is in Scotland
a greater demand for the mo