to the people, "that great multitude through whom speaks the Voice of the Almighty Power that makes for righteousness," we must give trusteeship for the irreplaceable treasures of the democratic ideals: respect for the will of the majority and the rights of the minority; respect for the law; respect for other men's opinions and beliefs; respect for the processes of evolution as against those of revolution; respect for the dignity of labor; and respect for the truth.

A nation which cherishes and protects with its last ounce of strength the sacred contents of this Ark of the Covenant is safeguarded from the worst dangers that beset the builders of a people's government.

CORNELIA J. CANNON.

CHANGES IN READING

BY JOHN COTTON DANA

THE effect of recent social and economic changes upon reading, and, conversely, the effect of reading upon those changes, will be a profitable theme for consideration by both those interested in literature and those interested in sociology and the progress of the world.

Of these changes the growth of newspaper reading is perhaps the most important. Before printing with movable type was invented, about 1457, few could read. Printing multiplied books. Readers thereupon increased in number; knowledge came to thousands where before it was the property of hundreds; knowledge promoted observation; observation led to thinking; ideas concerning oppression, serfdom and submission and concerning privilege and dominance of either birth or wealth swept through the European world; governments were modified and society was recast. It is now being recast more rapidly than ever before, and the process was in large degree born of printing and is today accelerated by printing.

The rapid development in recent times of all the sciences, with accompanying inventions, whereby is gained a mastery of the forces of nature and a utilization of its resources, all followed the wide diffusion of printed words. And the growth of the use of print is not an economic change which ceased its work after it had, in a few years, modified relations between man and man, between race and race, between nation and nation and between man and nature. It is a change which broadens and deepens its influence every day, every year, every decade and every century. Print and the growth thereof are now more potent in their influence on society than they ever were before, and that influence increases daily.

The power press, with revolving cylinders of type faces stereotyped in machines, was not in active use until after 1900. Paper

suitable for printing newspapers was not used in great quantity in rolls, ready to be fed automatically into a press, until 1880. Effective automatic type-casting and type-setting machines were not in general use until 1890. Cheap and good methods of producing pictures on rapid presses were not widely adopted until after 1890. Offset printing and the rotogravures of the Sunday supplement pictures are products of the last decade. Briefly put, one may say that the newspaper as we know it today is scarcely a generation old; and one need only turn the pages of a few journals on printing to learn that invention creates almost daily new devices and methods for making print cheaper, more legible, and with better pictorial accompaniments.

That all adults should be able to read is with us a conviction, having the quality of religious dogma. The wise man knows that the universal acquisition of ability to read is not a factor which can save a civilization from the destruction which other factors may prepare for it. But one need not be wise to know that whatever may be the destiny of the present civilization of Europe and America, it will soon be a reading civilization. If it goes to destruction, it will go with print in its hand!

The kind of print which comes next to the newspaper in importance, is perhaps the "casual". It includes, to mention a few only, the label on the omnipresent food container, roadside posters, car cards, and telephone directories. A few years ago food stuffs were bought in bulk by retail merchants, and weighed out and wrapped or bagged as called for. Today well nigh all the things the grocer of 1870 sold in the meaningless wrapper of the time, and many other things not then thought of as daily food for millions, come to the grocer in packages ready for delivery. On these packages is much reading matter, such as names, descriptions, directions, recipes, and suggestions on cleanliness, health and hygiene. From the grocer these printed messages go into millions of homes, and form the most homely and elementary reading, and are read daily by millions. Of the other groups of casual print just mentioned, it is enough to say that they do not simply compel us to become better readers; they make us each day better informed.

It may here be suggested that all this print merely makes us super

ficially informed, breeds no manner of thinking, tends to make us all alike and all equally indifferent to new ideas, and helps us to become more intolerant of change and more hostile to the new than we as a race have ever been. Perhaps that is true; but if it be true then in that growing indifference and intolerance lies one of the very changes which the printing press is working in us; making us idly recipient to impressions, like a bed of plaster which is not hardened by time and remains a sodden bed of plaster, no matter how many are the impresses that impinging bits of information make upon it.

But, that increasing knowledge tends to dull the brain and to impede thought and to make for hostility to the new, is not what common sense tells us. The empty mind is not inclined to work, if only because it has nothing to work upon. The active, inventive, forecasting brain never suffers from a surfeit of knowledge and does not find knowledge a burden or a hindrance to cerebration. Its joy is in thinking; and as it goes on along the open roads of thought, it casually absorbs whatsoever facts may give it aid or pleasure or both, and rejects what it does not care for. It seems to be part of the method of human progress that it goes on with knowledge; not necessarily because of knowledge, but, inevitably, with knowledge. And here, in a time of knowledge-gaining, knowledge-saving and knowledge-absorbing,—all through and by the printed word, such as could not have been conceived of a few centuries ago, and did not lie in the realms of the wisest prophecy even a hundred years ago, it is astonishing to note that the peculiar character of this reading period in human history, and of the effects of it on society, seem not to be thought worth discussion by students of society.

Returning to the growth of print using: The increase of control over the powers of nature gained by man in recent years, and the development of machines which has accompanied that growth, have so increased our capacity for production that many more persons than ever before find themselves with time for other work than that of gaining a livelihood, and with a surplus of energy which makes that non-working time seem irksome. Out of all this came recently a humanitarian outburst, a fever of altruistic activity.

The explanation here suggested of the outburst of uplift enthusiasm may not be correct. But it serves to introduce that promotion of the reading habit which has been one of the more important products of that outburst.

Here and there and everywhere have been organized for social betterment groups of persons, altruistically possessed and seeing visions of a world made better by the changes that a crusade along some narrow line can produce. All these voluntarily organized groups, some of them chartered corporations, some supported by "foundations”, and some supported by annual contributions of sympathizers, issue publications. These range from a modest occasional leaflet to pamphlets and books, and appear in editions, some of scores and some of millions. The organizations themselves number several thousand, and their ranks are added to constantly. Their printed output is spread broadcast. Much of it is of high value; much of it has to do with topics important to every household; much of it reaches the humblest homes; and from it comes no small influence toward reading, acquisition of knowledge and thinking.

The Federal Government, State governments, city and town and county governments, colleges, universities, school boards, banks, insurance companies, manufacturing corporations, railroads, steamship companies and institutions and organizations of many other kinds have discovered in recent years that the world reads; that leaflets and pamphlets, even though tossed aside by the majority, are read by the minority, and that the name of that minority is millions. In many cases the last impetus toward publication by these organizations has come from the same altruistic movement that has brought upon us the flood of uplift societies. Perhaps it is in part this altruistic touch which has led to the effort to make many of these publications beautiful, attractive, scientifically based and helpful in countless ways.

Trade, technical, class and professional journals now number about five thousand. Fifty years ago there were less than one hundred of them. Of these journals, the "house organ" has been in existence only a few years, is not enumerated in any national directory of periodicals, and has to excess the habit of being born and dying. The very fact that it is new and still unknown