OTHER EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES 395 



more promptly shown results. Begun as a benevolence, it has 

 grown to be an important part of an educational system. 



The dearth of reading matter in many rural homes is almost 

 beyond the belief of those to whom the daily paper, the weekly, 

 monthly and quarterly magazines, the well-filled private book 

 shelves, and the public libraries, general and special, have always 

 been a matter of course. To one accustomed to these, they are 

 necessities, and he little realizes the conditions which led that 

 child of a backwood community to cherish the catalogue of a 

 mail-order house as a choice possession. In order to show this 

 lack of reading matter more specifically it may be well to cite 

 the case of a certain township in the Middle West, where an in- 

 vestigation was carried on to learn just how much reading was 

 done. The principal of the schools of a small city near by, in co- 

 operation with the state library commission, made a survey of 

 the twenty-one homes in this sparsely settled township. The first 

 important discovery was that not one adult had read a book 

 during the last year. It is little wonder, for there was not a 

 new or attractive book in the whole three hundred owned in this 

 whole territory, covering one hundred and fifty square miles. 



The investigator found that at four homes there was not even 

 a Bible, which he had wrongly assumed would be in every home, 

 and did not at first count as a book, while five homes had no 

 other book than the Bible. A little more than half of the books 

 of fiction in the community were of the dime-novel variety. In 

 one American home, the family consisting of father, mother, and 

 ten children under seventeen, the total literary equipment con- 

 sisted of "The Foreman's Bride," "Who is the Creator?" 

 "Twenty Years of Hustling," and a Bible. The boy of thir- 

 teen years of age said that "The Foreman's Bride" was his favor- 

 ite book and that he had read it several times. Another home, 

 where both father and mother were Indians, contained about fifty 

 dime novels, with no other books or periodicals of any kind, al- 

 though both parents were educated at Carlisle. 



In two homes there were no periodicals, and in the others the 

 magazines were chiefly of the light literature type, Comfort, 

 Good Stories, Happy Hours, etc. One home had The Woman's 

 Home Companion, the Cosmopolitan, the American Home, and 

 Extension. Forty weekly papers and eight dailies were taken, 



