It is undoubtedly a great good that nearly all our people are taught to
read, but it is a small fraction of the community that reads to much
good purpose. Children, so soon as they have acquired the use of the
alphabet, are inundated with little juvenile stories, some of them good,
but most of them silly, and many vulgar. As they grow older, successions
of similar works of fiction await them, until they arrive at
adolescence, when they are fully prepared for all the wealth of folly,
vulgarity, falsehood, and wickedness that is bound up within the yellow
covers of most of the cheap novels that infest every highway of the
nation.
As you are jostled through the streets of our populous cities, or take
your seat in a crowded railway-car, you are, perhaps, impressed with the
general air of rudeness that pervades the scene,--a rudeness of a kind
so new to the world, that, no old word sufficing to describe it, a new
name has been coined, and the swaggering, careless, sensual looking
beings, reeking with the fumes of tobacco, that make up the masses of
our moving population, are adequately described only by the word
_rowdy_. As yet, no title has been found for the female of this class,
--bold, dashing, loud-talking and loud-laughing, ignorant, vain, and so
coarse that she supposes fine clothes and assuming manners are all that
is necessary to elevate her to the rank of a lady. Perhaps you wonder
how so numerous a race of these beings has come to exist; but that boy
at your elbow, bending under the weight of his literary burden, is a
colporteur for converting the men and women of this "enlightened nation"
to rowdyism.
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