tematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought, as if it were
destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose
and verse.

I remember, when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no
spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain
before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the
invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had
ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed
matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the
dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He
insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the
making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social
duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for
the sake of the readers; that the reliance on books as a cheap and
common resource had done much to weaken the powers of memory; that it
destroyed the craving for a general culture of taste, and the need of
artistic expression in all the surroundings of life. And he argued,
lastly, that the sudden multiplication of all kinds of printed matter
had been fatal to the orderly arrangement of thought, and had hindered a
system of knowledge and a scheme of education.

I am far from sharing this immature view. Of course I hold the invention
of printing to have been one of the most momentous facts in the whole
history of man. Without it universal social progress, true democratic
enlightenment, and the education of the people would have been
impossible, or very slow, even if the cultured few, as is likely, could
have advanced the knowledge of mankind without it. We place Gutenberg
amongst the small list of the unique and special benefactors of
mankind, in the sacred choir of those whose work transformed the
conditions of life, whose work, once done, could never be repeated. And
no doubt the things which our ardent friend regarded as so fatal a
disturbance of society were all inevitable and necessary, part of the
great revolution of mind through which men grew out of the mediaeval
incompleteness to a richer conception of life and of the world.

Yet there is a sense in which this boyish anathema against printing may
become true to us by our own fault. We may create for ourselves these
very evils. For the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed
with evils; it must be used wisely if it is to be