eg, who proceeded to eat up
the improvement, and in a generation produced sixteen other devourers
hungrier than themselves? It was an awesome picture, that ravenous and
reduplicating mouth! It cast a chill over humanity, and blighted the
hope of progress for many years. To some it is still a bodeful portent,
presaging eternal famine. It still hangs ominously over the nations.
But, on the whole, its terrors have lately declined; one cannot exactly
say why. Either the mouth is not so hungry, or it gets more to eat, or,
for good or evil, it does not multiply so fast. And now there are these
teachers of Eugenics, always insisting on quality.

The question is whether some similar means might not check the
multiplication of the ghosts that threaten to devour the mind of man.
The progression of man's mind can hardly be called even arithmetical,
and the increase of ghosts accelerates frightfully in comparison. If
Paris produced fifty books a day some years ago, London probably
produces a hundred now. And then there is Berlin, and all the German
Universities, where professors must write or die. And there are New
York and Boston. Rome and Athens still count for something, and so does
Madrid. Scandinavia is no longer sterile, and a few of Russia's mournful
progeny escape strangulation at their birth. Not every book, it is true,
embodies a living soul. Many are stillborn; many are like dolls,
bleeding sawdust. But in most there dwells some kind of life, hungry for
the human brain, and day by day its share of sustenance diminishes, if
shares are equal. They are not equal, but the inequality only increases
the clamour of the poor among the ghosts.

Take the case of novels, which make up the majority of books in the
modern world. We will assume the average of souls in a novel to be five,
the same as the average of a human family. Probably it is considerably
higher, but take it at five. Let us suppose that fifty novels are
produced per day in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and other large
cities together, which I believe to be a low estimate. Not counting
Sundays and Bank holidays, this will give us rather more than 75,000
newly created souls a year--cannibal souls, ravening for the brains of
men and women similar to the brains that gave them birth, and each able
to devour as many brains as it can catch. It is no good saying that
nearly all are short-lived, dying in six months like summer flies. The
dead are but succeeded by increas