That allusion to the predominance of fiction brings one round to the question of the Public Library. One is constantly reading attacks on these new and most promising institutions, and always these attacks base themselves on the fact that the number of novels taken out was so many times, so many hundred times greater than the number of “serious books.” Follows nonsense about “scrappy” reading, shallowness of the public mind, and so forth. In Great Britain public pomposities take up the strain and deliver large vague, foolish discourses on our intellectual decline. It occurs to none of these people--nothing, indeed, ever does seem to occur to this sort of people--to inquire if a man or woman _can_ get serious reading from a public library. An inspection of a Public Library Catalogue reveals, no doubt, a certain proportion of “serious” books available, but, as a rule, that “serious side” is a quite higgledy-piggledy heap of fragments. Suppose, for example, an intelligent mechanic has a proclivity for economic questions, he will find no book whatever to guide him to what literature there may be upon those questions. He will plunge into the catalogue, and discover perhaps a few publications of the Cobden Club, Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_, J. S. Mill’s _Autobiography_, Ruskin’s _Unto This Last, The Statesman’s Year Book for 1895_, and a text-book specially adapted to such and such an examination by the tutors of some Correspondence College. What can you expect from such a supply but a pitiful mental hash? What is the most intelligent of mechanics likely to secure for himself from this bran pie? Serious subjects are not to be read in this wild disorderly way. But fiction can be. A novel is fairly complete in itself, and in sticking to novels, the Public Library readers show, I submit, a better literary sense and a finer intellectual feeling than the muddle-headed, review-inspired, pretentious people who blame them.