The girls are not to blame if
they are as vapid and uninteresting as the ideal girls they have been
associating with in the books they have read. The responsibility is with
the novelist and the writer of stories, the chief characteristic of which
is vulgar commonplace.
Probably when the Great Assize is held one of the questions asked will
be, "Did you, in America, ever write stories for children?" What a
quaking of knees there will be! For there will stand the victims of this
sort of literature, who began in their tender years to enfeeble their
minds with the wishy-washy flood of commonplace prepared for them by dull
writers and commercial publishers, and continued on in those so-called
domestic stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) until their minds were
diluted to that degree that they could not act upon anything that offered
the least resistance. Beginning with the pepsinized books, they must
continue with them, and the dull appetite by-and-by must be stimulated
with a spice of vulgarity or a little pepper of impropriety. And
fortunately for their nourishment in this kind, the dullest writers can
be indecent.
Unfortunately the world is so ordered that the person of the feeblest
constitution can communicate a contagious disease.
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