A WORLD WITHOUT BOOKS
What if there were no letters and no books? Think what your state would be in a situation like that! Think what it would be to know nothing, for example, of the way in which American independence had been won, and the federal republic of the United States constructed; nothing of Bunker Hill; nothing of George Washington; except the little, half true and half mistaken, that your fathers could remember, of what their fathers had repeated, of what their fathers had told to them. Think what it would be to have nothing but shadowy traditions of the voyage of Columbus, of the coming of the Mayflower pilgrims, and of all the planting of life in the New World from Old World stocks, like Greek legends of the Argonauts and of the Heraclidae! Think what it would be to know no more of the origins of the English people, their rise and their growth in greatness, than the Romans knew of their Latin beginnings; and to know no more of Rome herself than we might guess from the ruins she has left! Think what it would be to have the whole story of Athens and Greece dropped out of our knowledge, and to be unaware that Marathon was ever fought, or that one like Socrates had ever lived! Think what it would be to have no line from Homer, no thought from Plato, no message from Isaiah, no Sermon on the Mount, nor any parable from the lips of Jesus!
Can you imagine a world intellectually famine-smitten like that—a bookless world—and not shrink with horror from the thought of being condemned to it?
Yet the men and women who take nothing from letters and books are choosing to live as though mankind did actually wallow in the awful darkness of that state from which writing and books have rescued us. For them, it is as if no ship had ever come from the far shores of old Time where their ancestry dwelt; and the interest of existence to them is huddled in the petty space of their own few years, between walls of mist which thicken as impenetrably behind them as before. How can life be worth living on such terms as that? How can man or woman be content with so little, when so much is offered?
J. N. LARNED.