I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude about the large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises from our misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon the attention in a state of society where public education and public taste are on the increase.  In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven in different departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities; so that discrepancies frequently present themselves.  We may observe, for instance, a quietly and tastefully dressed woman reading, we will say, Laura Jean Libbey.  We are disconcerted, and the effect is depressing.  But the discrepancy may arise in either of two ways.  If we have here a person formerly possessing good taste both in dress and reading, whose taste in the latter regard has deteriorated, we certainly have cause for sadness; but if, as is much more likely, we have one who had formerly bad taste of both kinds and whose taste in dress has improved, we should rather rejoice.  The argument is the same whether the change has taken place in the same generation or in more than one.  Our masses are moving upward and the progress along the more material lines is often more rapid than in matters of the intellect.  Or, on the contrary, intellectual progress may be in advance of manners.  Such discrepancies are frequently commented upon by foreign travelers in the United States, who almost invariably misinterpret them in the same way.  Can we blame them, when we make the same mistake ourselves?  M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book “En Amerique,” notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educated persons among us.  He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of a certain clergyman.  His thought is evidently, “How shocking that a clergyman should act in this way!” But we might also put it:  “How admirable that professional education in this country is so easily obtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it!  How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed in doing so!” These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorse neither of them.  But when I find that on the upper west side of New York, where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives and daughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale of living is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I do not say, as I am tempted to do “How surprising and how discouraging that persons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, and that not of the highest grade!” I say rather:  “What an evidence it is of our great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mental development, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature, are living in such comfort or even luxury!”