The question is not whether public libraries ought to provide novels, nor simply whether they should provide only the best novels and reject the bad. The important problem is, how the general reader is to be led to choose and enjoy the best. To spend public funds on the public provision of feeble and enfeebling reading-matter is indefensible. True, there are librarians who defend it: one head of a large system has recently pleaded for fiction of the Charles Garvice and Ethel Dell type, because the charwoman and the overworked housewife find it restful and soothing, and cannot afford to subscribe for it to the circulating library. But public libraries are not a sort of poor relief: their mission is not to provide, even these unhappy folk, with opportunities for mental dissipation; but, the very reverse, to introduce them to higher pleasures. Would apologists for bad novels recommend our public art galleries to adopt similar standards of taste? Or our museums? No doubt, if we turned them into a kind of Madame Tussaud’s or sensation-mongering picture-house, these would be much more popular with a very large and a very important class. This kind of argument hardly needs confuting: but many committees and librarians have been led astray by the specious doctrine that by giving people the inferior stuff they like they will eventually be led to prefer something better. The present writer, who has devoted years of hard work to shepherding the general reader into the right way of appreciating good fiction, would be the last to deny the humanizing value of the novel and its right to an honourable place in the public library; but he would be the first to deny that to get people to read any kind of novel, or to bring them at any cost into the public library, is a sure way of inducing them to read something better. Than much of the reading done at the expense of the library rate it would be better if no reading were done at all. A kind of mental dram-drinking, it is stupefying to the brain and soul, and thoroughly anti-educational. Homœopathic application of continual doses of the hair of the dog that bit you is a futile mode of treatment. The time has come for saner methods, and the only sane method is to refuse to recognize the stuff as having anything to do with the literature which a public library has to supply. Earlier pages have dealt with the various methods by which the standard of fiction reading can be raised--duplication of the best on shelves to which the reader has free access, descriptive catalogues and readers’ guides, lectures, talks, and reading circles. Our crusading efforts at raising the level of popular taste must be as strenuous as those of a revivalist mission.