Since there is not time in the short life of man to read all the good books written in one language, the young reader, or even the person who has formed the habit of reading, may feel that he need never go beyond the books of his own race. In a sense this is true. Perhaps it is especially true for us who are born to the English language. For the English people, however insular they may be in some respects, have always been great explorers of the lands and the thoughts of other races. They have plundered the literature of their neighbors and loaded the borrowed riches into their own books. In the Elizabethan age some writers seem to have regarded it as a patriotic duty to render for their countrymen the choicest literature of France and Italy and Spain. While they were robbing their neighbors across the channel, they were also building English classics out of the literary monuments of “insolent Greece and haughty Rome.” And for many generations English writers, like those of other modern countries, have been brought up on the classics. So we find incorporated in English literature the culture of the entire ancient and modern world, and one who should read only English books could still have a full mind and a cultivated spirit. We cannot say, therefore, that it is necessary, in order to realize the true purpose of reading, to make excursions into the literature of foreign countries. But we can point out the advantage of such excursions, and I would insist on the ease with which the ordinary person, who has enjoyed only a limited formal education, can make himself acquainted with foreign languages and literatures if he will. In our time we have schools to teach everything known to man from advertising to zoölogy. It is well that our schools are broadening in interest and that every kind of knowledge is being organized so that it can be imparted. But there is a danger that we may get into the habit of leaving too much for the schools, that we may come to think that the schools monopolize all knowledge, or at least all the methods of teaching. This would be a great pity in a nation that is proud of self-made men. We, of all peoples, must remember what Walter Scott said, that the best part of a man’s education is that which he gives himself. Schools and universities only start us in a methodical way, on a short well-surveyed path, into the world of knowledge. Most of the learning of educated men and women is acquired after they have left the college gates, and anyone may set out on the road to knowledge with little direct assistance from the schools. The better, the easier for us, if we can go to college; but if we cannot have the advantage of formal education we need not resign ourselves to ignorance.[4]