Primarily, we must, in studying anything so widespread as printed matter, get rid of one fundamental error in our use of the words good and bad. We speak of a knife that is blunt as a bad knife or a paint-box that yields hard and weak colour as a bad paint-box. For practical purposes this is right enough. Compared with other objects of the same class these things are bad. But for all that the word bad is a misnomer; for bad things are things that hurt us, not things that please us insufficiently. A blunt knife is not bad, unless it cuts us, and then, for the matter of that, it is not so bad as a sharp knife would be. A paint-box is not bad, unless we eat the paints, and even the most exquisite greens and purples may be discordant if mingled internally. A common knife is good because however hard it may be to carve a joint with it, it would be much harder to carve it with an umbrella. A common paint-box is good, because however hard it may be to extract paint out of it, it would be much harder to extract it out of a lump of red sandstone. These things, however rude, are inventions. The most forbearing British father would complain if he were asked to carve the joint with one of the primitive flint-knives of the British Museum. But in their cases in the British Museum we respect them as if they were the relics of a saint.

 -June 8, 1901,  The Speaker