If we agree that democracy will advance until the majority rule in reality, and not merely in theory, these things must concern us. It is of little use to point to the occasional periodical with small circulation which endeavours to educate, to the occasional educative column in more important journals, or to the occasional lecture or serious concert or drama. The broad fact remains that our future rulers are increasingly encouraged to refrain from mental cultivation, to mistake an appeal to the imagination for knowledge, and to debase their taste more and more with raw representations of crime and passion. The working man reads with indignation of fashionable ladies struggling to find a place in court when a man is being tried for a series of sordid murders; and the working man then reads, day after day, a three-column verbatim report of the trial, and regrets that there is not more of it. In order to meet this grave public need an earlier generation invented night-schools and Mechanics' Institutes. Many of these still do useful work, but their number shrinks rather than increases. The Co-operative Movement, again, set up in the early days a fine ambition to educate its adult members, but this ambition has not been generally sustained in the vast modern movement. Hundreds of lecture-societies were founded, and hundreds (about seven hundred in Great Britain, I believe) exist to-day and do some excellent work; but many of the societies which adhered most faithfully to the educational ideal are in difficulties or extinct. The travel-lecture or funny lecture and the "popular" concert encroach more and more on the serious programme. Free libraries were another hope of the reformers of the last generation, and they are now endowed by millionaires and maintained by municipalities. They exhibit, perhaps, the saddest perversion of social ambition. Neither Mr. Carnegie nor any serious municipality thinks it a duty to provide gratuitous entertainment, but at least two-thirds of their resources are really devoted to this. The enormously greater part of the work of free libraries is to beguile the idle hours of young men and the idle days of young women with novels that rarely contain a particle of intellectual stimulation.