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THE RATIONALE OF FREE PUBLIC UBRARIES. 47
remarkable fmt has been before my notioe, and continually oonfirmed
by a long experience in the Manchester Free Libraries,
that schoolboys or students who took to novel reading to auy
great extent never made much progress in after-]&. They
neglected real practical life for a sensually imaginative one,
and suffered accordingly from the enervating influence." This
matter is far too debafable to be argued out in this place; and
I would only answer to Mr. Kay that it is quite too late in tho
political day to think of restraining the reading of sensational
literature. In this respect our boats were long since burnt
behind us. Time was when the paper duty and various
cunningly devisod stamp duties were supposed to save tho
common people from the domoralising effects of literature.
But tho moralist has now only to notice some of tho dingy
shops crowdod with cheap penny and halfpenny papera, in
order to feel that restraint of literature is a thing of the past,
as much as the parish stocks or the ducking-stool. There is a
perfect deluge of low class and worthless periodical literature
spreading over the country, and it can only be counteracted by
offering gratuitous supplies of literature, which, whether it be
fiction or not, may at any rate be pure and harmless, and often
of great moral and intellectual excellence. What between tho
multiplying powers of the steam-press and the cheapness of straw
and wood paper, fiction of the '(penny dreadful" class can be
issued ad in.nitzrrn. The only question is, whether the rn-9
of the people are to read the most worthless and often immoral
trash, or whether they are to have the best class of fictionthat
of Dickens, of George Eliot, of Trollope, and the resG
placed within their reach.
Many attempts have been made and are being made by
societies or by enlightened publishers to place constant supplies
of pure and yet attractive litemtnre within the reach of the
mass of the people. But I venture to think that a wide extension
of the Free Library system is a necessary complement ko such
efforts. It seems to me impossible to publish the best light
litsratnre at a price to compete with the inane penny or halfpenny
novelettes, whereae the Free Lib- offers the best
works of fiction or general literature free of charge to the