To represent a fictitious story as real or an imaginary portrait as a true one is, of course, a fault, but the story and the portrait may both be of the highest excellence when the subjects are wholly imaginary.  It should be noted that the crime of false representation, when committed with success, removes a work from library classification as fiction and places it in one of the other classes.  Indeed, it is probable that much more lasting harm is done by false non-fiction than by fiction.  The reader, provided he uses literature temperately, has much less need to beware of the novel, which he reads frankly for entertainment, than of the history full of “things that are not so,” of the biased biography, of science “popularized” out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories in sociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading as philosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers and pseudo-naturalists.

In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate.  One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result is the same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction.  One may thus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics—­the mathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he does exist—­and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is that fiction is more attractive to the average man.  We do not have to warn the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any more than we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears, or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits.  Fiction has the fatal gift of being too entertaining.  The novel-writer must be interesting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not often regard it as necessary—­unless he happens to be a Frenchman.

But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit that the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least in so far as he deals with the adult reader.  We furnish parks and playgrounds for our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful, but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess—­that a man may not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent in supporting his family.  So in the library we may and do see that harmful literature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books which are not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess.