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Importance of Reading, I mean the habit which is quite steadily growing in all civilized countries of using print to gain acquaintance with the great mass of human thought, experience, study and imagination.

This mass of what for the sake of brevity we group under the one word knowledge, has become very great and mounts up with marvelous rapidity. Under oral tradition, when things were handed down by memory and speech only, the sum of knowledge was small. The invention of writing increased this sum very considerably. Reading completes the importance of writing which it deserves. Books are for us only, either written by our ancestors or by someone else. Every book is packed of some wisdom points, some teachings and many more interesting and beneficial things.

Evolution, with its survival of the more fit and the resulting improvement of the species, seems to have ceased to operate on the human race, so far at least as increase of intellectual power is concerned, before history began. We have been at our best for full 200 generations. During this long period we have failed again and again to cope successfully with the evils national success has brought in its train. We have never had to aid us in one of these crises the habit of reading; and here, perhaps, lies our salvation in the next struggle of civilization for eternalness.

But, we now discover that the same invention which brought us the habit of reading has aroused to more active operation an encyclopedic evolution, an accumulation of knowledge, vast beyond all the conceptions of our predecessors.

The increasing value to men in every walk in life of the ability to take from the printed page those facts, arguments, theories and imaginings that can help him in his calling. Professionalism, socialism, the student of the remotest specialty in medicine and all can gather from reading that which will help them to find, to be and to do.

Now, it is of the essence of society’s progress that its units become more efficient each in its way. No one thing can to-day contribute so much to the efficiency of each unit as can the habit of using reading to learn what others have learned.

Other things may contribute somewhat to this efficiency; reading can contribute most. All advocates of education have made that statement the very foundation of their faith. It means that books are the prime tools of learning; that a library is the most important of all laboratories, and that high reading power in our native tongue is the most valuable of all the acquisitions that the schools can give.