their existence.

To the superiority of the American public school system over the
English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general
education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any
especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the
confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a
phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But
the educational system of the country has been by no means the only
factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a
matter of record, and not without interest to American readers, to note
what some of those other factors have been during the last twenty
years--factors so temporary and so elusive that even now they are in
danger of being forgotten.

First among these factors I would set the American postal laws, an
essential feature of which is the extraordinarily low rates at which
periodical literature may be transmitted. A magazine which may be sent
to any place in the United States for from an eighth of a penny to a
farthing, according to its weight, will cost for postage in England from
two-pence-halfpenny to fourpence. It is not the mere difference in cost
of the postage to the subscriber that counts, but the low American rate
has permitted the adoption by the publishers of a system impossible to
English magazine-makers, a system which has had the effect of making
magazines, at least as good as the English sixpenny monthlies, the
staple reading matter of whole classes of the population, the classes
corresponding to which in England never read anything but a local
weekly, or halfpenny daily, paper. It might be that the reading matter
of a magazine would not be much superior to that of a small weekly
paper. But at least it encourages somewhat more sustained reading and,
what is the great fact, it accustoms the reader to handling something
_in the form of a book_. That is the virtue. A people weaned from the
broad-sheets by magazines readily takes next to book-reading.

Moreover, under the American plan, books themselves, if issued
periodically, used to have the same postal advantages as the
magazines.[171:1] A so-called "library" of the classical English,
writers could be published at the rate of a book a month, call itself a
periodical, and be sent through the post in precisely the same way. The
works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or anybody else could be published