The third part of the printed matter published from day to day, periodicals and magazines and newspapers, presents a complex problem. It is in place for us to say a word about it, for this is avowedly a guide to reading and not a guide to literature, and most of us spend, properly, a good third of our reading time over magazines and newspapers. Much depends on our making ourselves not only intelligent readers of books but intelligent readers of periodicals and papers. The magazine industry in America is colossal, and its chief support is that amazing business institution, American advertising. The public pays a big tax on flour, shoes, clothes, paint, and every other commodity in order that advertisers may pay for space in periodicals and newspapers. The periodicals and newspapers, in turn, pay writers from a fiftieth to a twentieth of the income from advertising in order to make the advertising medium interesting enough for people to buy it. In this the magazine manufacturers are on the whole successful. Perhaps there are sages and seers who can live content with bound books and prefer that those books should be at least fifty years old. I know of one man, a constant reader of poetry and philosophy, who tried the experiment of retiring to his library and stopping all his subscriptions to the current periodicals. The experiment was an utter failure, because he was a man of active intelligence, and because, in truth, the magazines, many of them, are very good. No less a philosopher than Professor William James said in a recent article: “_McClure’s Magazine_, _The American Magazine_, _Collier’s Weekly_ and in its fashion, _The World’s Work_, constitute together a real popular university.... It would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like these: ‘By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of their human preferences, the people at large acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private literary ventures, commonly designated in the market by the affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.’ Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this?” The possible failure, here implied, of universities to lead in the subjects which they profess to study has already become actual in the departments of English literature. Of this we shall say something in the next chapter.