We must remember that the whole discovery of reading is new to great classes of the community [..] It is not strictly true to say that any of their reading is bad; for it is entirely good that there is an ingenious code of signals by which are conveyed to them the inmost thoughts and secrets of men long in their graves. It is not true, strictly speaking, that any of the fiction they read is bad for it is altogether a good thing that they should. in any shape or form, live that mystical double life that separates man from the beasts, one life in the daily duty of selfishness, the other in that strange and fantastic unselfishness which makes the fate of some non-existent hero, the creature of an idle brain, almost as important as our own [...] These things are not, in the proper meaning of the word, bad, any more than a man is bad for not being Shakespeare, or a hill bad for not being Mount Everest.

-June 8, 1901, The Speaker