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to provide for proper information and for easy distribution.

We have a second task, and that is to impress upon everybody
the importance of the reading habit. That requires, perhaps,
subtler and more varied methods, but it is a task which, if we properly
decentralise our activities, can be performed in some degree by
every one of us. Speaking as one who, till a few years ago, was a publisher,
I have been enormously struck by the iwnense growth of the reading
habit in Britain since the War. Books, which before 1914 had only a
small and slow circulation, now sell as largely as a popular novel
did in the old days. If I am not egotistical in taking a personal
example, I would instance my own Cromwell and my book called
The King's Grace. The reason why the War had such an effect upon reading
was partly, I think, the cutting off of other methods of amusement.
But even more it was due to the fact that so great a crisis made people
think. Reading induces thought, but also thought induces the
habit of reading. When the mind is awakened it looks naturally for
guidance and assistance from the thought of the past, and that thought
is enshrined in books.

Now a time of depression has the same spiritual effect as a
time of war. It gives many people an enforced leisure. It awakens in
everybody an inclination to turn their minds to the graver issues of
life. It also makes necessary a certain mental relaxation, the opportunity
of turning away from the difficulties of everyday life to the
happier world of the imagination. Now we and the whole world have
been going through a time of depression and I think that is the reason
why the interest in reading, stimulated by the War, has not relaxed
since the War. We have a chance today which we did not have in