Literature for the Boys and Girls.
By S. K. B.
A LADY was asked recently to what benevolence she would devote $50,000, if it were at her disposal. Her reply was: "I would use it in an effort to develop a taste for the better class of literature among our boys and girls." We believe her answer struck at one of the main roots of the immorality of the day. The minds of boys and girls are being poisoned beyond belief. They become so familiar, through reading, with every form of folly and vice, and so feed their imaginations upon what is low and vile, that their moral sensibilities become blunted, and they are no longer shocked when they come in contact with the reality. Pope wrote of vice:—
"Familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace." But the "endurance" and the "pity" are now too often experienced through the medium of the dime novel and sensational stories, within the very precincts of the home, and the young reader is ready to "embrace" at first meeting. The question comes, How are we to meet this evil? We believe that the solution of the problem lies with the Christian workers of our land, and that they will solve it only when they make as great an effort to put that which elevates into the hands of the youth, as is now being made by the emissaries of evil to circulate that which degrades. Parents must awaken to the fact that it is no less a duty to supply their children with pure and happy literature than to furnish shoes for their feet and bread for their mouths. They must learn that unless their boy finds plenty of attractive reading on the parlor table, he will be likely to exchange his dime for a thrilling story of the Jesse James type, which he reads on the sly, and then slyly exchanges with a neighbor boy for an equally pernicious tale. The indifference of the masses in regard to this evil is truly alarming. A great cry is raised over drinking and gambling, while comparatively little is said of the influence exerted by vile literature, which, it may be no exaggeration to say, bears somewhat the same relation to the saloons and gambling dens that the preparatory school does to the college. Well-meaning parents in Christian homes, while careful to ask where their children go and what they do, quite forget to ask what they read; and we hear twenty ministers denounce from the pulpit the liquor traffic, where one raises his voice against this more subtle and therefore more dangerous evil. Anthony Comstock is doing a noble work in trying to put down vile literature; perhaps no man in the land is more unselfish in his labors. But we ask, What is being done to put something of worth in the place of that which he throws out? Unless something wholesome and attractive is substituted, his work will have little of permanent value. It is not simply by attacking the impure, but by setting forth the worth and beauty of the pure as well, that moral reforms are to be effected. Surely, if vile literature is one of the strongest forces of evil, pure literature may be made one of the most potent for good.—S. K. B., in Christian at Work.