It is hard to realize, even when we make the conscious effort, how much of the general culture, intelligence, and power of the American people is due to the habit of reading. That there is not a more marked and easily discernible difference between the intelligence and practical efficiency of the college-bred man and of the man of less training is largely due to the fact that the one reads as widely and continually as the other. Even superficial and omnivorous reading is an efficient source of intelligence and power. So universal is this habit of reading among the native-born people of the Northern States, that it is hard for them to conceive of its absence. It costs us an effort to imagine the mental status of a person who cannot or does not read. Yet there are millions of people in the South who cannot read and millions more who do not. It is one thing to teach a child how to read; it is quite another thing to make him _love_ to read, to give him the _habit_ of reading. And the first has comparatively little value without the other. It is of little moment that a million children have been taught the art of reading if they do not practice it freely. Now the fact is that of the hundreds of thousands who have been in the freedmen’s schools but a very small part have ever formed the reading habit. And, as one consequence, even college graduates of the colored race have far less general intelligence and intellectual efficiency than white people of much more limited education. There is nothing singular or unaccountable about this. It is the natural consequence of the circumstances existing. The parents of these young people were slaves, to whom reading was a forbidden art. In their houses, highly as the ability to read may be prized, and earnestly as it may be sought for their children, there are as yet no books, no magazines, no newspapers even. If, indeed, there be any printed thing there, it is almost without exception of the most trashy, crude, and worthless, if not vile and corrupting, sort, from both the literary and the moral point of view. The dime novel, the “Fireside Companion,” the sloshy, ungrammatical local newspaper are, at the best, all that one may hope to find. In cultured homes, children acquire the habit of reading by contagion. It is fairly _bred_ into them. But in the homes of the freedmen there is no contagious example, and there can be none. There is for the colored youth no inheritance of culture in any way. Children in Northern homes take in more of culture through the skin, by unconscious absorption, in the first ten years of life than the freedmen’s children can ever acquire except by long years of schooling.