We need not discuss the cheaper fiction magazines. They are obviously prepared for a still different reading public. The public to which the better ones appeal is indicated by the dominant character of the advertising, which consists largely of aids to beauty and correspondence courses in self-improvement. The stories in such periodicals are as typical as the advertisements. Thus it is that in their daily preferences, as truly as in the greater issues of their lives, people select themselves and are segregated into classes, or spiritual types--types which may live in daily contact with one another, yet worlds apart. Democracy strives to ignore the cultural differences among people. Education intensifies them. The attempt to place everyone on the same mediocre plane, even though it be a level considerably above the lowest, is not education; it is a kind of social work. Education means finding one’s own level. Like all progress it is qualitative and differentiating. Just as organic evolution is a process which can be measured only in the extent of the differences it has made between higher and more complex organisms and lower ones, so with education. It brings out distinctions of human worth, places people on the rounds of a ladder, the gradations of which are discernible in the kind of interests they have, in the quality of their choices, the perplexities they wrestle with and overcome, the tasks and issues they set themselves. The general advance of civilization is in some respects like that of the individual. We may learn much about the general cultural attainment of any age by noting the issues that divided people at that time and the problems that troubled them. There are all sorts of “cultural lags” in the course of progress, but it helps us to estimate the general intellectual level Europe had attained at the close of the middle ages to learn that whole communities could be terribly disturbed over the question, “What is the evil omen of a comet which suddenly appears in the zenith?”--so disturbed indeed that on one occasion it is said popular pressure forced the Pope to go out and pronounce an official curse upon a comet and command it to leave the sky, which it did much to everybody’s peace of mind. Again, we can form something of an opinion of the mentality of an age in which there is general interest in such a question as “Shall a person accused of witchcraft be put to torture to compel him to testify against himself?” or, “How far may one walk on the Sabbath day without committing sin?” or “Does the doctrine of the rights of man apply to negro slaves?” or “Who amongst us has committed the unpardonable sin,” or “Will a child that dies without baptism go to Hell,” or, by way of illustrating something of the spirit of contemporary America, “Who’s your bootlegger?”