.... Everybody agrees that this is the most intelligent, active-minded age that ever was, and in its way the most prolific and productive age. ..... Isn't it an odd outcome of diffused education and of cheap publications, the decline in the habit of continuous serious reading? .....

There is no product that men use which is now so cheap as newspapers, periodicals, and books. For the price of a box of strawberries or a banana you can buy the immortal work of the greatest genius of all time in fiction, poetry, philosophy, or science. But we doubt if the class that were to be specially benefited by this reduction in price of intellectual food are much profited. ..... We very much doubt if the mass of the people have as good habits of reading as they had when publications were dearer .... their serious reading habit has gone down with the price. ....

We have an increasing leisure class. When does it read? .... It is a curious comment on the decay of the reading habit in households, the blank literary condition of the young men who come up to the high-schools and colleges. Is it owing entirely to the modern specialization of knowledge that they usually have read little except their text-books?

Now we are not trying to defend the necessity of reading. They say that people got on in the Middle Ages very well without much of it, and that the women then were as agreeable, and the men as brave and forceful, as in this age. But it is certainly interesting to consider whether, by reason of cheap and chopped-up literary food, we are coming round practically to the Middle Ages relative to reading, that is, to reading anything except what is called news, or ingenious sorts of inventions and puzzles which can be talked about as odd incidents in daily life are talked about. Reading to any intellectual purpose requires patience and abstraction and continuity of thought. This habit of real reading is not acquired by the perusal of newspapers, nor by the swift dash which most people give to the cheap publications which are had for the picking up, and usually valued accordingly. It is an open question whether cheap literature is helping us any toward becoming a thoughtful and reading people.