The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-01-06
READING NOW AND FIFTY YEARS
 AGO


 How can population living a wholly artificial life in great cities be the same as a population living in country cot tages and small towns? How can population in which every man daily soaks his mind in modern journalism be the same as a population of whom some read the Bible and few sound books, and the rest nothing at all? Be- fore the industrial revolution the ordl- nary working of economic law left the majority of manual laborers unen- liehtened indeed, but natural in mind, habits and emotion delighting in sports in which they themselves took part, and cheered by songs, ballads and stories of their own countryside that were never vulgar and often exquisite. Meanwhile that large minority on whom education was then bestowed had religion, imagi- nation, intellect. But all seem to have possessed natural taste in arts and crafts Gas all their surviving houses, furniture and utensils show). And these qualities, 'in widest commonalty spread" were the general conditions that produced in individual cases the high triumphs of English literature. So long as man minded his business in cottage, farm, mansion and shop, Eng fish life was vigorous and beautiful, But how can it tow be beautiful, and how even vigorous for anything eX- cept material ends? For it is the com mon sights and sounds of daily life which stimulate or deaden the imagi- nation, awaken or stitle the esthetic and the moral qualities. No one has ever attempted to deny this principle since Plato laid it down as the reason why the artists in his republic should "by the power of genius trace out the nature of the fair and graceful, that our young men. dwelling as it were in healthful region, may drink in good from every quarter, whence any emanation rom noble works may strike upon their eye, or their ear, like a gale waiting health from salubrious lands, and win them imperceptibly from their earliest child hood into resemblance, love and har- mony with the true beauty of reason"
 What a ghastly satire are these old Athenian words on the sights and sounds that now pursue our distracted city race from earliest childhood' through life that Is in it's externals like one long journey by the Under ground!
 Fifty years ago majority of those who could read were in some real sense educat ed. Therefore the press follow ing the law of supply and demand, was so used as to appeal to an educated public. Even those readers who were
 lyc nd newspapers a little above their intellec- tual level, since these came most easily to hand. Now these conditions have been reversed. The number of people who can read is enormous; the propor ton of those who are educated is small. The printing press, following the law of supply and demand, now appeals to the uneducated mass of all classes. Many even of the educated, too lazy to observe that book or newspaper of 1900 doe not mean the same thing as book or a newspaper In 1850, join in the universal nettle feast, and know not eating death" Bad or indifferent lite rature is thrust into mems hands, the noise of it is dinned into their ears with persistency against which the fewest are proof. Not only does the vulgar read nothing but vulgarity, so sacrificing the chance of gradual inn provement which he used to enjoy, but the man with better capabilities reads so contantly below the true level of his taste and intellect that his ideals are gradually debased, and he takes no pains to recommend good books and journals to his children. Until the reading of nonsense comes to be regard ed by respectable gamilies in the same light as dram drinking. the press will , do more universal harm than the pub lie house.-George Macaulay Trevelyn in the Nineteenth Century.