This prejudiced and disproportionate treatment of literature would not be so regrettable if the _Britannica’s_ criticisms were cosmopolitan in character, or if its standard of judgment was a purely literary one. But the criteria of the Encyclopædia’s editors are, in the main, moral and puritanical. Authors are judged not so much by their literary and artistic merits as by their _bourgeois_ virtue, their respectability and inoffensiveness. Consequently it is not even the truly great writers of Great Britain who are recommended the most highly, but those middle-class literary idols who teach moral lessons and whose purpose it is to uplift mankind. The Presbyterian complex, so evident throughout the Encyclopædia’s critiques, finds in literature a fertile field for operation. Because of the limitations of space, I shall confine myself in this chapter to modern literature. I have, however, inspected the manner in which the older literature is set forth in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; and there, as elsewhere, is discernible the same provincialism, the same theological point of view, the same flamboyant exaggeration of English writers, the same neglect of foreign genius. As a reference book the _Britannica_ is chauvinistic, distorted, inadequate, disproportioned, and woefully behind the times. Despite the fact that the Eleventh Edition is supposed to have been brought up to date, few recent writers are included, and those few are largely second-rate writers of Great Britain. Let us first regard the gross discrepancies in space between the biographies of English authors and those of the authors of other nations. To begin with, the number of biographies of English writers is nearly as many as is given all the writers of France and Germany combined. Sir Walter Scott is given no less than thirteen columns, whereas Balzac has only seven columns, Victor Hugo only a little over four columns, and Turgueniev only a little over one column. Samuel Richardson is given nearly four columns, whereas Flaubert has only two columns, Dostoievsky less than two columns, and Daudet only a column and a third! Mrs. Oliphant is given over a column, more space than is allotted to Anatole France, Coppée, or the Goncourts. George Meredith is given six columns, more space than is accorded Flaubert, de Maupassant and Zola put together! Bulwer-Lytton has two columns, more space than is given Dostoievsky. Dickens is given two and a half times as much space as Victor Hugo; and George Eliot, Trollope, and Stevenson each has considerably more space than de Maupassant, and nearly twice as much space as Flaubert. Anthony Hope has almost an equal amount of space with Turgueniev, nearly twice as much as Gorky, and more than William Dean Howells. Kipling, Barrie, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Felicia Hemans are each accorded more space than either Zola or Mark Twain.... Many more similar examples of injustice could be given, but enough