Some minds cannot help producing them.  They produce them as easily as the queen bee produces the eggs that hatch into drones.  And both the number and productivity of such minds are terribly on the increase.  A few years ago Anatole France told us that, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day were published, not to mention the newspapers; and the rate has gone up since then.  He called it a monstrous orgy.  He said it would end in driving us mad.  He called books the opium of the West.  They devour us, he said.  He foresaw the day when we shall all be librarians.  We are rushing, he said, through study into general paralysis.

Does it not remind one of the horror with which the wise and prudent about a century ago began to regard the birth-rate?  They beheld the geometrical progression of life catching up the arithmetical progression of food with fearful strides.  Mankind became to them a devouring mouth, always agape, like a nestling’s, and incessantly multiplying, like a bacillus.  What was the good of improving the condition of Tom and Sal, if Tom and Sal, in consequence of the improvement, went their way and in a few years produced Dick, Poll, Bill, and Meg, 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.