t, is certain
to deteriorate in his quality, nay more, as a beginner he is satisfied if
he can produce something that will sell without regard to its quality. Is
it extravagant to speak of a tendency to make the author merely an
adjunct of the publishing house? Take as an illustration the publications
in books and magazines relating to the late Spanish-American war. How
many of them were ordered to meet a supposed market, and how many of them
were the spontaneous and natural productions of writers who had something
to say? I am not quarreling, you see, with the newspapers who do this
sort of thing; I am speaking of the tendency of what we have been
accustomed to call literature to take on the transient and hasty
character of the newspaper.

In another respect, in method if not in quality, this literature
approaches the newspaper. It is the habit of some publishing houses, not
of all, let me distinctly say, to seek always notoriety, not to nurse and
keep before the public mind the best that has been evolved from time to
time, but to offer always something new. The year's flooring is threshed
off and the floor swept to make room for a fresh batch. Effort eventually
ceases for the old and approved, and is concentrated on experiments. This
is like the conduct of a newspaper. It is assumed that the public must be
startled all the time.

I speak of this freely because I think it as bad policy for the publisher
as it is harmful to the public of readers. The same effort used to
introduce a novelty will be much better remunerated by pushing the sale
of an acknowledged good piece of literature.

Literature depends, like every other product bought by the people, upon
advertising, and it needs much effort usually to arrest the attention of
our hurrying public upon what it would most enjoy if it were brought to
its knowledge.

It would not be easy to fix the limit in this vast country to the
circulation of a good book if it were properly kept before the public.
Day by day, year by year, new readers are coming forward with curiosity
and intellectual wants. The generation that now is should not be deprived
of the best in the last generation. Nay more, one publication, in any
form, reaches only a comparatively small portion of the public that would
be interested in it. A novel, for instance, may have a large circulation
in a magazine; it may then appear in a book; it may reach other readers
serially again in the columns of a newspa