Religious decentralization exerts also a powerful influence on the arrangements for imparting that instruction which provides purchasers for books.  The Methodist Society, with its gigantic operations; the Presbyterian Board of Publication; the Baptist Association; the Sunday-school, and other societies, are all incessantly at work creating readers.  The effect of all these efforts for the dissemination of cheap knowledge is shown in the first instance in the number of semi-monthly, monthly, and quarterly journals, representing every shade of politics and religion, and every department of literature and science.

The number of these returned to the census was 175; but that must, I think, have been even then much below the truth.  Since then it has been much increased.  Of two of them, Putnam’s and Harper’s, the first exclusively original, and the latter about two thirds so, the sale is about two millions of numbers per annum; while of three others, published in Philadelphia, it is about a million.  Cheap as are these journals, at twenty-five cents each, the sum total of the price paid for them by the consumers is about $700,000.  The quantity of paper required for a single one of them is about 16,000 reams of double medium, being one tenth as much as has recently been given as the consumption of the whole newspaper press of Great Britain and Ireland.  Every pursuit in life, and almost every shade of opinion, has its periodical.  A single city in Western New York furnishes no less than four agricultural and horticultural journals, one of them published weekly, with a circulation of 15,000, and the others, monthly, with a joint circulation of 25,000.  The “Merchants’ Magazine,” which set the example for the one now published in London, has a circulation of 3,500.  The “Bankers’ Magazine” also set the example recently followed in England.  Medicine and Law have their numerous and well supported journals; and Dental Surgery alone has five, one of which has a circulation of 5,000 copies, while all Europe has but two, and those of very inferior character.[1] North, south, east, and west, the periodical press is collecting the opinions of all our people, while centralization is gradually limiting the expression of opinion, in England, to those who live in and near London.  Upon this extensive base of cheap domestic literature rests that portion of the fabric composed of reproduction of foreign books, the quantities of some of which were given in my last.  The proportion which these bear to American books has been thus given for the six months ending on the 30th of June last: 

Republications   169
Original         522

691

   [Footnote 1:  It is a remarkable fact that there should be in this
   country no less than four Colleges of Dental Surgery, while all Europe
   presents not even a single one.]

Of these last, 17 were original translations.

We see, thus, that the proportion of domestic to foreign products is already more than three to one.  How the sale of the latter compares with that of the former, will be seen by the following facts in relation to books of almost all sizes, prices, and kinds; some of which have been furnished by the publishers themselves, whilst others are derived from gentlemen connected with the trade whose means of information are such as warrant entire reliance upon their statements.