that rises on every side of us to-day. We are on the right track at last, the press and the publishers assure us; and with tons of healthy juvenile literature flooding the markets every year, our American boys and girls stand fully equipped for the intellectual battles of life. But if we will consider the matter in a dispassionate and less boastful light, we shall see that the good accomplished is mainly of a negative character. By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness. These little volumes, nicely written, nicely printed, and nicely illustrated, are very useful in their way; but they are powerless to awaken a child's imagination, or to stimulate his mental growth. If stories, they merely introduce him to a phase of life with which he is already familiar; if historical, they aim at showing him a series of detached episodes, broken pictures of the mighty whole, shorn of its "mys-
