A parallel folly has been committed in hundreds of communities which have taxed themselves to banish illiteracy and to make ignorance impossible among the young people. Reading is carefully taught; the ability to read is followed by an appetite for reading; a strong desire for the mental food derived from the printed page is created. Yet nothing is done to supply the right kind of books for the purpose of gratifying this appetite. The average youth is allowed to get what he can from the book-stalls, which contain much that is as deleterious to the soul as some plants of the nightshade family are to the body. It is as much a duty to supply proper literature as it is to impart the ability to read. When, in the twentieth century, some historian shall give an account of the educational development of Pennsylvania, he will record it as a fact passing strange and well-nigh incapable of explanation that for more than three decades there stood upon the statute-books of a great commonwealth a law preventing boards of directors from appropriating any school funds to the purchase of books for a school library except such works of a strictly professional character as were necessary for the improvement of the teachers. Within the last decade a new era has dawned in library legislation and in the purchase of books. Directors are now empowered to levy a tax for library purposes, and free libraries are springing into existence not only in the large centres of population, but even in the rural schools. The movement has come not a whit too soon; for habits of reading are sadly needed to supplement life in the factory and on the farm. To make from day to day nothing except the head of a pin, or the sixtieth part of a shoe, may develop marvellous skill and speed in workmanship, but such division of labor leaves little room for intellectual activity or for anything above the merest mechanical routine.
It should not occasion surprise that operatives in factories seek the mental excitement which human nature always craves after hours of monotony. Far better that they should find recreation in a good book than in a game of cards, in a free library than in a drinking-saloon. That the workman may taste the joys of the higher life of thought, it is essential that he have access to the best literature in prose and poetry, to books of travel, biography, history, science, and sociology. If he lack these, his mind will lose itself in local gossip, in discontent over his lot, in envy of those who have more to eat and drink, better clothes to wear, and better houses to live in. Of the pleasures of the higher life he can have as many as, if not more than, others have; for at the close of the day his mind is not exhausted by professional thinking, and he can enjoy a good book far more than the men whose daily occupation obliges them to seek recreation in physical exercise.