which minister to the craving for excitement, and are really dissipating books, as there go out the grave, serious, instructive books, we may judge what will be the proportion of demand for such books in the public at large. Now let us ask what a publisher will do in face of these facts. He knows what these demands are, and he has to choose what books he will reprint. A publisher who has laid himself out for rival editions is comparatively unlikely to choose one of the really valuable books, which needs more circulating. I will not say he will never do it. He will do it sometimes; but he will be far more likely to choose one of these books appealing to a numerous public, and of which a cheap edition will sell largely. Hence, therefore, the obvious result will be to multiply these books of an inferior kind. Now, already that class of books is detrimentally large: already books that are bad in art, bad in tone, bad in substance, come pouring out from the press in such torrents as to very much submerge the really instructive books; and this measure would have the effect of making that torrent still greater, and of still more submerging the really instructive books. Therefore, I hold that, if the stimulus to rival editions acted as it is expected to act, the result would be to multiply the mischievous books.
Q. (Mr. Trollope). Do you not think that, in making the parallel that you have there made, you have failed to consider the mental capacities of readers?
A. I was about, in answering the next question, to deal indirectly with that; pointing out that while there is a certain determining of the quality of reading by the mental capacity, there is a certain range within which you may minister more or you may minister less. There are people who, if they are tempted, will spend all their time on light literature, and if they are less tempted will devote some of their time to grave literature. Already the graver books, the instructive books, those that really need circulating, are impeded very much by this enormous solicitation from the multitude of books of a gossipy, sensational kind. People have but a certain amount of time and a certain amount of money to spend upon books. Hence what is taken of time and money for uninstructive books is time and money taken away from the instructive; and I contend that, if there were a diminution in the quantity of the books of this sensational kind published, there would be a larger reading of the really instructive books; and that, conversely, the multiplication of this class of lighter books would tend to diminish the reading of instructive books. I am now speaking, not, of course, of the higher amusing books, because there are many that are works of value, but of the lower novels, Miss Braddon's and others such.
Q. Do you think that a man coming home, say, from his eight or ten hours' labor in court day after day is in a condition to read Lyell's "Geology" as men read one of Miss Braddon's novels?
A. We are speaking of some ordinary man. No, not an ordinary man, certainly.
