for us, and we only need to absorb.  It is pleasing to see how this theory is getting to be universally applied.  All knowledge can be put into a kind of pemican, so that we can have it condensed.  Everything must be chopped up, epitomized, put in short sentences, and italicized.  And we have primers for science, for history, so that we can acquire all the information we need in this world in a few hasty bites.  It is an admirable saving of time-saving of time being more important in this generation than the saving of ourselves.

And the age is so intellectually active, so eager to know!  If we wish to know anything, instead of digging for it ourselves, it is much easier to flock all together to some lecturer who has put all the results into an hour, and perhaps can throw them all upon a screen, so that we can acquire all we want by merely using the eyes, and bothering ourselves little about what is said.  Reading itself is almost too much of an effort.  We hire people to read for us—­to interpret, as we call it —­Browning and Ibsen, even Wagner.  Every one is familiar with the pleasure and profit of “recitations,” of “conversations” which are monologues.  There is something fascinating in the scheme of getting others to do our intellectual labor for us, to attempt to fill up our minds as if they were jars.  The need of the mind for nutriment is like the need of the body, but our theory is that it can be satisfied in a different way.  There was an old belief that in order that we should enjoy food, and that it should perform its function of assimilation, we must work for it, and that the exertion needed to earn it brought the appetite that made it profitable to the system.  We still have the idea that we must eat for ourselves, and that we cannot delegate this performance, as we do the filling of the mind, to some one else.  We may have ceased to relish the act of eating, as we have ceased to relish the act of studying, but we cannot yet delegate it, even although our power of digesting food for the body has become almost as feeble as the power of acquiring and digesting food for the mind.

It is beautiful to witness our reliance upon others.  The house may be full of books, the libraries may be as free and as unstrained of impurities as city water; but if we wish to read anything or study anything we resort to a club.  We gather together a number of persons of like capacity with ourselves.  A subject which we might grapple with and run down by a few hours of vigorous, absorbed attention in a library, gaining strength of mind by resolute encountering of difficulties, by personal effort, we sit around for a month or a season in a club, expecting somehow to take the information by effortless contiguity with it.  A book which we could master and possess in an evening we can have read to us in a month in the club, without the least intellectual effort.  Is there nothing, then, in the exchange of ideas?  Oh yes, when there are ideas to exchange.  Is