But there will be trouble, as I have said.  The thing, simple as it is, would be too unaccustomed to comprehend.  And then a real article in a real cyclopaedia by a real writer is Information with a big “I.”  My little knowledge about making quince jelly, or darning stockings, or driving an auto, or my thoughts about the intellectual differences between Dickens and Thackeray, or my personal theories of conduct, or my reasons for preferring hot-water heat to steam—­these are all too trivial to mention; is it possible that you want me to write them down on paper?

It may thus happen that when the committee opens its mail it may find—­nothing.  What, then?  Logically, I should be forced to say:  Well, if none of your members is interested enough in anything to have some original information to tell about it, disband your club.  What is the use of it?  Even three newsboys, when they meet on the street corner, begin at once to interchange ideas.  Where are yours?

Possibly this would be too drastic.  It might be better to hold a meeting, state the failure, and adjourn for another trial.  It might be well to repeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence of original ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate.  If this does not work, it might be possible to fight the devil with fire, by going back to the programme method so far as to assign definitely to members subjects in which they are known to be deeply interested.  This, in fact, is the second method of treatment mentioned at the outset, namely, the endeavour to secure immunity where the germ cannot be exterminated.  We shall probably never be able to rid the world of the bacillus tuberculosis; the best we can do is to keep as clear of it as we can and to strengthen our powers of resistance to it.  So, if we cannot kill the programme all at once, let us strive to make it innocuous and to minimise its evil effects on its victims.

Let us suppose, now, that in one way or another, it is brought about that every club member who reads a paper is reporting the result of some personal experience in which her interest is vivid—­some discovery, acquisition, method, idea, criticism or appreciation that is the product of her own life and of the particular, personal way in which she has lived it.

What a result this will have on that woman’s reading—­on what she does before she writes her paper and on what she goes through after it!  If her interest is as vivid as we assume it to be, she will not be content to recount her own experiences without comparing them with those of others.  And after her paper has been read and the comment and criticism of other interested members have been brought out—­of some, perhaps, whose interest she had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse to search for new accounts and to devour them.  There is no longer anything perfunctory about the matter.  She can no longer even trust the labour of looking up her references to others.  She becomes an investigator; she feels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge.