We cannot know all foreign literatures, but we can know at least one. Whether we visit in spirit Italy or Norway or Spain or Russia, we shall be learning the great lesson of literature, that our brothers the world over are doing and thinking and hoping the same things that we are. Reading foreign books[6] is the cheapest and perhaps the wisest kind of travel, for the body rests while the mind goes abroad. FOOTNOTES: [4] See also page 241. [5] See also the discussion of Chapman, pp. 245-8 of this Guide. [6] Books in foreign languages and English translations will be found in their proper place in the lists of fiction, poetry, etc. CHAPTER XI THE PRESS OF TO-DAY If we were guiding an intelligent stranger from another planet through our busy world, before what institution should we pause with greatest anxiety to explain to our alien comrade its meaning, its value? Perhaps before the church, yet when we remembered that the Bible and other works of religion and poetry are in our homes, we could not bring ourselves to tell our companion that the church is the heart, the indispensable fountain of our religious life. The school then? Maybe that, yet Knowledge spends in the school but relatively few hours of her day-long ministrations. We might wax eloquent before the hospitals, but they are only repairing some of the damages which man and nature have inflicted upon a small part of the race, and it is the healthy major portion of humanity that carries on the life of the world and does whatever is worth doing. It would be simple to explain the thundering factories whose din drowns the voice of the expositor, to tell how in yonder building are made the machines that cut and thresh the wheat that feeds the world, and how in the building beyond are made the cars that bring the wheat from the fields to the teeming towns. All these institutions are wonderful, all are essential in our life. Yet greater than any, more difficult to explain, inspiring and disheartening, grinding good and evil, is the press, from which our visitor could see streaming forth thousands of tons of paper blackened with the imprint of little types. The stranger could see that. We should have to make it clear to him that those types are turning over once a year almost all that man has ever known and thought. The contemporary press is engaged in three kinds of activity: the reprinting of old books, the printing of new ones, and the printing of the magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and other communications relating to the conduct of daily business. The first activity, the printing of old books, is an unmixed blessing. Every book, great or small, that the world has found worth preserving is continuously revived and redistributed to our generation. Never before were the classics of the ages so cheap, so accessible to the common man.