My subject is “Libraries as Leaven,” or the relation of libraries to the increased diffusion of knowledge.

What is a Library? It is the knowledge of all brought within the reach of each one. It is an expanded encyclopÆdia, or the books which are, or ought to be, consulted in compiling a perfect encyclopÆdia.

Human knowledge—and hence the books in which it is treasured up—is divided by some authors into forty departments. I have their names here all written down—but I dare not read them. You would give no more quarter to such a catalogue than the lover gave to the mercantile inventory of his sweetheart's charms, when itemized as “two lips indifferent red,” “two gray eyes with lids to them,” and so on.

But all these forty classes of knowledge ought to be represented in a library, and the more largely the better. They should also mingle there in due proportion, “parts into parts reciprocally shot, and all so forming a harmonious whole.” “If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing?”

I once lived in a town of a thousand families, where, through a legacy, one copy of some single author was annually presented to each family. But, with the same money, a thousand different works might have been every year purchased, and all kept accessible by all the families. The result would have been a feast as appetizing to all palates as the miraculous manna which the rabbins tell us tasted to each Jew like that particular dainty which he loved best.

It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through. No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for a man to read all the words in the daily Tribune. Nor will any customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from bibliothecal rubbish—or reading which had never been read. Hence even Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an ass: “I have no need of you.” The wise thank God for fools. They get their living out of them, and mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough. Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee.

A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement, catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable lost in mid-ocean.

In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems borrowed from Spanish hospitals, where patients are arranged according to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult.

Chief Justice Story used to assert that no American could test the accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an assertion would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet penetrated west of our Atlantic slope.

But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the Pacific shore, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array of bibliothecal catalogues.

Why will not our Centenary Women's Club buy our Free Library a Zosimus?

Free libraries, especially those maintained by public taxation, were scarcely known before the last half of the nineteenth century. If in an antiquarian mood, I could indeed bring forth curious details concerning half a hundred in continental Europe, some of them running back several centuries, but I forbear. The earliest British library law, similar to ours in Wisconsin, dates from 1850. The earliest in Massachusetts—and I suppose in America—was approved May 24, 1851. The first library opened in consequence of this law was in New Bedford, March 3, 1853. The grandest triumph under the Massachusetts law is in Boston. The free library there stands to-day surpassed in volumes by only three or four American libraries—say the Astor, Congress, and Harvard—while in arrangement, architecture, and equipment it is pronounced by the most enlightened foreigners unsurpassed by any library in the world.

Our legislature in 1872 empowered the mayors and councils in towns and cities to lay an annual tax of one mill on a dollar of the assessed valuation, for establishing and maintaining free libraries. This law will bear good fruit. Yet it is a step backward from the act of 1859. That act created a library fund by setting apart for that purpose one-tenth of the school-fund income, and imposing a tax of one-tenth of a mill on all property. The sum of $88,784.78 had been thus accumulated when the war of 1861 broke out,—and the money was used for military purposes. It ought to be refunded by the State, or United States, and expended for its original object. The great superiority of the law of 1859 lies in its extending to rural districts,—and so leaving no hamlet unvisited—while the maxim of the present law is, “Coals to Newcastle, owls to Athens, apples to Alcinous. He that hath—to him shall be given.” It gives a library to Madison, where 40,000 volumes were already within reach, but nothing at all to five and twenty other places in Dane County, whose need of books is ten times greater. But libraries bring forth after their kind, and free libraries, we may hope, will become co-extensive with free schools.

Madison, to-day, in opening to all her sons and daughters a Free Library, has outstripped every other municipality in the State. It is a noble preËminence, and will do her honor to the end of the world.

The Madison Free Library, it may be reasonably hoped, will approximate to the bibliothecal ideal. It starts with an inheritance of 3,308 volumes, accumulated during a score of years by the Madison Institute. Its revenue is considerable, and it will grow in even pace with the growth of the city. Nothing but Adam and Minerva was ever born of full stature. The tax now assessed for it would impoverish no man till after the lapse of thrice three thousand years. It was limited to less than a third of what the law allows because we make the entering edge of a wedge thin, and would learn wisdom from Satan who never makes his temptations so bad at the beginning as at the end. Is is only the first step that costs. The Free Library will be ready for windfalls, and so surely as history repeats itself, they will pour cornucopias into its lap. Of the million volumes in the British Museum, two out of every five were gifts. No wonder. Book-gatherers abhor the breaking up of their collections as we do the dissolution of the Union, or as abolitionists did the snapping of family ties by slave-traders. Lest what they have joined together shall be put asunder, they rejoice to lay up their treasures in an institution which shall never die. Accordingly, in tracing the origin of one hundred and eighty libraries in continental Europe, it has been discovered that all of them, except sixteen, were presented to the municipalities by book-lovers.

Experience this side the Atlantic is thus far equally encouraging. I will notice a single specimen. The Boston Free Library is mainly contributed by individuals. One thousand volumes were given by Everett; 2,300 by Bowditch; 11,360 by Theodore Parker; 26,000 by Joshua Bates; 11,899 by the Old South Church, and those of greater rarity than any other equal number of volumes. Then Ticknor and Prescott bestowed the best Spanish library ever gathered by private men, and Wheelwright one scarcely inferior, relating to South America. Of pecuniary benefactions, I will only mention $10,000 from Lawrence, $30,000 from Phillips, and $50,000 from Bates. But legacies to the Free Library have become so common that we may confidently expect that, if any Bostonian shall die and bequeath it nothing, the courts will decide the neglect of the Library to be conclusive proof of insanity, and so will nullify his will! On the whole, we cannot be too sanguine concerning the prospective progress of our book-feast for the million.

But a library, however perfect, and though freely open to all the world, may be a light shining in a darkness which comprehendeth it not. Many years ago, I was a student in such a library at Rome. It was larger than any one in America at that time, and offered the best of all its stores daily to everybody, and that without charge. Yet it was well-nigh a solitude. The reason was obvious. My walk thither was through a gauntlet of beggar-boys, and I once took with me an Italian primer, and cried out that I would give something to any boy who could read. I held it up before nineteen in succession, but no one could spell out a line. They had eschewed not only writing as tempting to forgery, but reading also as a black art. Had they been giants they could,—like the barbarians who sacked Rome,—ruin, but not relish, the nectared sweets of books. To them the collective wisdom of the world was as sunshine to the blind, or as smoke in the nursery riddle,—“roomful, houseful, can't catch a handful!”

But in regard to our Free Library, I have better hopes, and beg your leave to show what use, in my judgment, will be made of it. It will be resorted to for amusement. Some will flit through it in the spirit of the Viennese, who turn their central cathedral into a thoroughfare on promenades and business walks. But such visitors will learn something in glancing at the backs of books. Books, as well as men, have a physiognomy. Here, as elsewhere, the admirers of Shakespeare will take out his plays, return them with the leaves uncut, and then insist that booksellers be instructed if Mr. Shakespeare writes any new book, to forward it without further orders. Many will have no eyes except for the volumes of fiction, and sometimes will rather run through these than read them. Novels are a sort of cake, which, if eaten alone, is prone to make mental dyspeptics. Yet most novel-readers will gain some profit from our library. Some of them will here acquire a facility in reading which for lack of practice has hitherto been unknown to them. No one has really learned to read, until he has read to learn. Their interest in stories will beguile the toil of becoming ready readers, and their range of reading will naturally widen. But if it does not, they may learn much. Every good fiction is true, if not to particular fact yet to general principles, to natural scenery, to human nature, to the ways of human life, manners, customs, the very age and body of the time. Even Tom Moore declares that “his chief work of fiction is founded on a long and labourious collection of facts.” Again, when worn out by work, when care-crazed, and nerves are unstrung, who has not found in fiction—the balm of hurt minds—a recreation, a city of refuge, a restorative.

In this way our free library will be a new pleasure, and the founder of it deserves the reward offered by the Sicilian tyrant, for such an invention. Work was never so monotonous as now; accordingly, play ought to be more than ever amusing. The Kilkenny cats, who devoured each other all but the tails, left one orphan kitten which began to eat up itself, but catching sight of a mouse was diverted from suicide. There is among us more than one disconsolate kitten now destroying himself, who will in our free feast of fiction espy a mouse which will reconcile him to life, and save him from himself. The rationale of this solace is indicated after a forcible, though rather a homely fashion, in the Chinese saying: “A dog chasing game does not mind the fleas which he barks at while he lies in his kennel.” “The labour we delight in physics pain.”

Again, in all great works of fiction the purpose is, while not o'erstepping the modesty of nature, to show virtue her own feature, and scorn her own image. Who can count the admirers of Scott and Dickens that have learned from their portraitures moral lessons so well as never to forget them;—to loathe the mean and aspire to the noble;—to shun evil and cleave to good—in spite of temptations to one and from the other?

But, after all, our book-treasury will only now and then bestow its best gifts on those who resort to it merely for pleasure. To most visitors of this class it must remain no more than a telescope to a child, something to play with rather than to look through. Accordingly, they no more exhaust the capacities of books than the Irish made full proof of potatoes while they cooked only the balls and left the tubers to rot in the ground.

But the Free Library will be resorted to for instruction. Few will always hold the amusing button so close to their eyes that it will hide the instructive sun. From the start it will be superior to every private collection in the city, and its superiority will increase. Accordingly, professional men will come thither to inform themselves either each in his own specialty, or sallying on excursions from their home fields. Besides the time-honoured and traditional three professions, editors and teachers will be there, learning how to answer the hard questions of pupils and subscribers. Each of these professionals will more or less make known what he learns. The bibliothecal odor will be as plain upon them as a certain other odor is upon those who emerge from the smoking-car or saloon. “Dispensing native perfumes they whisper whence they stole those balmy spoils.” But the bibliothecal leaven will leaven the community more directly.

God has set geniuses as great lights in the firmament to give light and delight as well on the earth. The circuit of such suns is unto the ends of the heaven, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. More and more pervasive is their influence, like the spring-time, which leaves no corner of the land untouched. In a library every man will recognize some supreme author transfiguring whatever he touches,—crystallizing into diamonds by wit, turning to gold with poetry, and glorifying as with tongues of angels by eloquence, and whom he hence worships as Scotchmen do Burns and as all the world does Shakespeare. Less and less do men entertain angels unawares, more and more are they ashamed to know the world's books only by name. Nobody now asks concerning Paradise Lost, “What does it prove?”

Moreover, the Free Library will be patronized by the people in quest of answers to multitudinous questions. Newspapers, whether in its reading-room or out of it, will rouse in many directions a curiosity they cannot satisfy, and so will urge to the library. There is a story that an Englishman in a London library, after looking through an atlas, said to a friend, “Help me find Umbrage on the map! I read in my gazette that the French have taken Umbrage. What a good-for-nothing minister is ours—to leave Umbrage so poorly defended that the French could take it.” That John Bull discovered in the library either umbrage, or what was better for him—his own ignorance and the way to remove it, “taking umbrage” against himself. His gazette probably brought the same earnest inquirer to the library for history as well as for geography. A daily paper, which is the history of the world for one day, leads backward, as a stream carries our thoughts to its fountain. Whoever repairs to a library with one historical query will be likely to repeat his visit, since newspapers, in the light of history, will become more significant as the last chapter in a novel is more interesting to those who have read the previous chapters, and so often leads one back to them. Again, discussions are always arising, not merely in formal debates, but as we sit in the house and walk by the way. Some carry them on by assertions and counter-assertions—a strong will and a strong won't—equally positive and ignorant, discussing and sometimes leaving off the dis, till like Milton's devils they find no end, in wandering mazes lost. Too often “It comes to pass that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent twanged off, gives an opinion more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned it.” Others back up their opinions by wagers, in spite of a lurking feeling that

But where standard books are at hand, investigation will often either take the place of disputation, or bring strife to a speedy end.

Let us hope those here seeking props for their arguments will never be those jealous lovers of books who cannot use them without using them up, or who spirit them away for themselves alone. Such abductors have sometimes infested the libraries in the Capitol. Their thefts can be justified only by that casuistry which holds stealing the relics of saints for a pious fraud. But in truth the more holy the saint, the more heinous the sacrilege of what Hood calls Book-aneering.

Moreover, every lecture delivered in the city will send some investigators to the library, that they may confute, or confirm, or amplify its teachings. A lecture that pops will not be as surely popular as formerly, if the library shall evince that what is true in it is not new, and that what is new is not true, or that the speaker draws on imaginations for facts and on facts for imaginations.

Every meeting of our Women's Centennial Club will start inquiries which cannot be answered without recourse to the library.

It is certain that books of travel will here be largely consulted. Some of us purpose to go abroad. Such will read beforehand in order to add a precious seeing to their eyes. They would dislike to have their experiences those of a lady who when asked what she saw in Rome answered “dirt,” or of the London barber who at the coronation of Napoleon remembered nothing except that the Emperor was well shaved, or of the Bostonian fresh from the West who, when called on for his opinion of Madison, said it would be a pretty fair Massachusetts village if it were not spoiled by so many fresh water ponds around it. Others among us have travelled already, and we shall be studious in the library that we may ascertain what we ought to have seen—but did not, or the meaning of what we did see, but which was Greek to us. The Shah of Persia noted in his journal that of all the fine things in Europe the finest to his mind was a show of wax work. His library would teach him better, and would not laugh at him, as we do. A Vermont friend of mine, after his trip to London, when asked whether he saw Westminster Abbey, confessed that he did not, but added that Westminster Abbey was out of town at the time of his visit. If he had free course in our library he would hardly excuse himself in that way again. Soon after crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, I heard a New York merchant, bound for California, remarking: “How much geography one learns in travelling. Here is Burlington. I always thought it in Illinois, but now I find it is in Missouri.” Library-reading may by this time have added insight to his sight, and convicted him of the blunder which I suffered to pass uncorrected, though we chatted 100 miles together. There are others of us who, on hearing a traveller's tales, are curious to examine how far we, like the old prophet, should count the way-faring man a fool, and how far he uses his license to lie. Hence they will read that they may make up their minds whether all Mark Twain's caricatures have the ring of truth.

A German table d'hote of twenty courses will surfeit a careless diner before it is half over, and yet fail to afford him either what he likes best or what he should like best. Hence it compels guests to a careful choice what they will partake of and what refuse of the blessing there is no room to receive in its fulness. A similar influence will be exerted by the free library where we fall into the embarassment of riches. We shall be driven to select from its bill of fare, that is the catalogue, that fraction which we can enjoy most and which will profit us most.

Some persons, when they survey a library and perceive that they can never read the hundredth part of its volumes, will be attracted to those works which teach “what to read,” or open a panoramic outlook on the diversified regions of the bookish world.

Unless we thus liberalize our views we are likely to vegetate, like the rhubarb pie plant, under a barrel, and see the world only through its bunghole. Ignorant of bibliographical guides and hence at a loss how to estimate books, the steward of a British nobleman sold as rubbish all volumes in the library which lacked covers. One of those thus disposed of, and bought by a pedlar for nine pence, proved to be the very earliest issue of the British press, snapped up by the British museum for £80, and could not now be bought for ten times that sum. In regard to the intrinsic value of books blunders more egregious are daily made. Libraries were never so needful as now, for libraries and life never lay so close to one another as now. Our familiar sights lead to interest in recondite knowledge. Photography, gas, the locomotive, kerosene, yes, every match that lights it, provokes questions in chemistry, or philosophy, which not every library can answer. No one can gaze at the dome of our Capitol without naturally falling into architectural inquiries which draw him through a world of books that expose the nakedness of his ignorance, yet never put him to open shame. But the truth is too palpable to dwell on that in our day life touches libraries at every point.

In all libraries there are readers whose emblem is dead fish who follow the stream, but thanks to various accidents, some of this class, ceasing to be passive recipients, begin to investigate as active seekers. They at once rise to a higher mental plane. The contrast between active seekers and passive recipients is analogous to that between the mountaineers and the maritime aborigines of California. The mountaineers lived on grizzly bears—food which it was impossible to seize without tasking their energies to the utmost. But tasking trains. The maritimes lived on salmon, which were so abundant and so tame that they could be caught by fishers who lay basking in the sun. But basking enervates. Naturally enough no Indians are superior to the mountaineers who are active seekers, nor yet inferior to the maritimes, who are passive recipients. What investigators seek they will not find at once; they may never find it. But they are sure to discover something better, so that they will say with Lessing, in the library at Wolfenbuttel, “Were God to hold truth in one hand and search in the other, and give me my choice, I would say: Give me seeking without finding, rather than finding without seeking!”

In the library where Lessing was made librarian—not that he might serve the library, but that the library might serve him—I took in my hand with reverence the inkstand out of which he distilled the essence of a thousand books, and reformed German literature as radically as Luther had reformed German religion.

All truths being inter-dependent, every road will lead to the end of the world, and so while studying one subject a man becomes interested in others, and his range of inquiry expands. When he kindles one dry stick, many green ones will catch, and his brightest blazes are lit up by unexpected sparks. One quickly learns to love hunting, and before working up many topics, he forms an investigating habit which will perpetuate itself. Thus while seeking an oyster, he finds a pearl, like Saul who sought asses and found a kingdom. Henceforth he reads more by subjects, each a cord to string pearls on, than by volumes, for he feels that,

But less and less of that sort is his reading, though it range through all time, and tax all the world. Such an inquirer will live longer than Methuselah, for he will have more thoughts, yet he will wish each of his minutes was a millenary. He will read with an appetite growing as long as he lives; indeed reading will help him to live longer. A thousand such readers feel what one has spoken out, saying:

“In a library I was thrown, instead of worse society, into the company of poets, philosophers and sages—to me good angels and ministers of grace. From these silent instructors who often do more than fathers for our interests, from these delightful associates I learned something of the divine and more of the human religion. They were my interpreters in the House Beautiful of God, and my guides among the Delectable Mountains of Nature,

Pre-eminently to the young will the myriad-minded library be an oracle in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new key to the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they get jack knives they take to whittling. The public schools then find in free libraries their fitting supplement, and complement. Schools without libraries feed a prisoner with salted viands and then tantalize his thirst with pitchers and bottles, all empty. The free school and the free library will join hands like husband and wife in a well-matched marriage.

Each befits the other, as Alexander said concerning the finest poem and the most costly casket in the world when he enshrined the Iliad in the Persian box of gold and gems. Both are lotteries where tickets cost nothing and everybody may draw all the prizes.

In addition to this, the free library will be to some nothing less than an inspiration. To some—I wish I could say to all, but alas, it is only an “elect few” whom the library can inspire. Spectacles are invaluable,—but only to those who have eyes. One Sultan never wore a shirt that had not every word of the Koran written on it yet absorbed little piety. Aaron's excuse for making only a golden calf was, that the Jews did not bring him gold enough to make an ox. The cherubim who know most can never equal the seraphim who love most. An ugly and stupid man, walking with a lady on each arm, boasts that he is between wit and beauty, but may not imbibe one particle of either.

To some, however, a free library will make up for the lack of a liberal education. More than that. It will furnish such an education every jot and tittle of it, and that, in some sense, better than was ever bestowed in a college, because acquired in the face of greater difficulties. Libraries have often vouchsafed this priceless boon. That in Salem did to Bowditch, the mathematician, in the last century, and to Whipple, the essayist, in this. The Edinburgh library made Hume an historian. Another was inspiration to Cobbett. So was that of the Erfurt convent to Luther. “It had purchased,” says his biographer, “at heavy cost, several Latin Bibles just printed for the first time in the neighboring city of Mainz. When he first opened one of these tomes his eyes fell on the story of Hannah and Samuel. “O, God,” he murmured, “could I have one of these books I would seek no other worldly treasure.” A great revolution then took place in his soul. His happiest hours were in the library. Concerning such a scholar—

The influence of ancient Libraries on classical writers is manifest from their quotations. Plutarch's have been traced to 250 authors. Pliny's to 2,000 works. Classical Libraries preserved in Constantinople, so long as studied, made there a Goshen of light in the Dark Ages, and when carried to Italy proved a Promethean spark to kindle occidental culture anew. It is well known that inventions are oftenest struck out in the Patent Office, the grand store-house of inventions. In the world of mind, as well as of matter, new ideas are suggested where old ideas most congregate, or are most communed with. According to Chaucer,

The idea of writing the “Life of Columbus” first darted into the mind of Irving, when, in Madrid, he found himself surrounded by an unrivaled magazine of materials made ready to his hand, and for which the world had been ransacked. Thus the sight of means to make good books makes good books made.

Not only those volumes which compose the body of literature, but those finer essences which form its soul,—the literature of power,—stamped in Nature's mint of ecstasy—are marked all over with proofs of familiarity with the best that had been achieved,—each in its own department. Nobody has hesitated thus to affirm concerning Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Milton. But it is commonly said that Shakespeare was ignorant. The truth is that no ignorant man, no ordinary, scholar can understand his allusions, historical, romantic, classical, or those to art, science, nationalities, customs—or even his words. He could get more from a Library in a day than most men in a life-time, but he needed it still.

In speaking of Shakespeare, I mean the man who wrote the Plays reputed his, no matter whether that author was Bacon, or John Smith, or even our townsman George B.

We ought to say that Shakespeare was a universal man,—because he was heir of all ages,—and his was universal knowledge, a knowledge which neither can we fathom nor could he find without a library.

His peculiarity was ability to discern the immortal part of books, or to stamp what were otherwise perishable with his own immortality. Whoever can do much without tools, can do more with them. Accordingly men do their broken weapons rather use than their bare hands. Whoever can do much without a library, can do more with a library. David did much with a sling, but more with better arms, and builded an armory on which there hung a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

If then there be among us any one person endued with any spark of Shakespearian or other genius he will find it kindling to a flame through contact in this library with similar celestial fires. To such a “meeting soul!” as Milton calls it,—the library will prove a better bonanza than has been prospected in our States of silver and gold. Though having nothing he shall possess all things,—infinite riches in a little room.

Thus our Free Library will amuse, and instruct, and inspire. Over its entrance I seem to read as on the front of the oldest in the world, the inscription, “The healing of the soul,” or the words of Franklin to his namesake town, “I give you books instead of a bell, sense rather than sound.” Let it have free course for a generation, calling to culture as ceaselessly as a standing army calls to war, and this community will say with Seneca, “Leisure without books and letters is mental death and burial.”

The first public library in Ohio—just two years younger than the State—was founded in Ames. It was bought by hunters who threw together a lot of raccoon skins, sent them in a sleigh by one of their number to Boston and there bartered them for books. They soon hunted Greek as zealously as game, and while Ames remained a hamlet ten of them, or their children, were among the early graduates of the State University.

The influences of a library are cumulative, and sometimes become manifest only after a long lapse of ages. The cuniform library of Assyrian bricks, dating from pre-historic periods, burned up, buried and forgotten just now emerges from its grave speaking in a voice heard round the world, and no less authoritative than a second book of Genesis. From its shelves more centuries look down upon us than upon Napoleon at the Pyramids.

Libraries are hemmed in by no lines of State, nation, race, language, religion or century. Their field is the world. But ours is the cosmopolitan age, and we are pre-eminently the cosmopolitan people. More than any other people, then must we feel the need of libraries, which are, of all institutions, the most cosmopolitan. Hence they will benefit us most.

Considerations like these demonstrate that free libraries tend to equality and fraternity. They are free lunches, crying to all: “Cut, and come again!” As we all have equal rights at the polls and in court, so have we in the free library. In church we each secure a blessing in proportion to our capacity; so can we in the library. In both blessed are they who hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled. In public schools all can enjoy the best of teaching without money and without price; so can they in the free library. Free libraries will create an aristocracy—one open to talent and toil, but to nothing else; the aristocracy of knowledge. Where street cars have been introduced, half the private carriages are soon given up, so the establishment of free libraries will lead many to refrain from large domestic collections as superfluous, and to the transfer of many a private library to the public shelves, where they will not only do more good, but will be better cared for, better arranged, and more accessible than they now are even to their owners. One millionaire as we walked into his library, said with a sigh: “See how many gaps there are in my shelves! Five hundred of my books are missing, lent and lost.” “Lost!” cried I, half in joke, “say rather found! lost to you, but found each by some one who will make the most of them. Would to heaven these 5,000 were lost in the same way, lost by you who have no time nor care for them, found by those who have both. Nobody could steal them from you, but at most only from moths and worms, dust and mould.” Rich men who have bought libraries as luxuries will learn that the way to save them is to lose them, and that their books serve them best when deposited in free libraries.

Many varieties of sham equality result from outside pressure. In Venetian gondolas all awnings are required to be black that no one may outshine his neighbor. Under the first republic the French proscribed all titles but citizen, and citizeness, which they gave to everybody. Communists would make all men's shares in property equal. Endeavors of this sort not only fail, but prove suicidal like the impetuous Irishman, insisting that one man is as good as another, and a great dey better too. The influence of Free Libraries, however is toward genuine and not merely visible equality. Thanks to them the most expensive luxury of the rich becomes the daily food of the poor, and the tree of knowledge no more bears forbidden fruit. A volume which I can draw out of a library at will is worth as much to me as if I owned it. In fact, though my private library is not small, the books I read are more often borrowed than my own.

If I take out books from a library, I am doubly spurred to to make their contents my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what book we borrow.

Franklin tells us that “he often sat up reading, the greater part of the night, when a book borrowed (he means stolen) from booksellers in the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found missing.” In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become alike inside, in real communion with great authors, in information, taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,—accomplishments which cannot be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his fellows. Men will still differ by God, not by man. What then is the Free Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?

When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing. But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and say; “These are our jewels.” Not tombs, but living shrines that on the living still work miracles,—the shrines where all the relics of the saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the dumb speak—the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is

Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and University parks are without.

A library,—the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;—reminds me of that fresco by Raphael, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces, popularly styled “The School of Athens,” and which I hope to see hung up as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical man, like Franklin's Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. Socrates, with sly humor, is humbling the self-sufficient Alcibiades that he may rouse him to loftier aspirations. Pythagoras is writing among disciples, one of whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the temple, appear Aristotle, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to the earth, and Plato, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for God. The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as Raphael painted—and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,—which is well said to unite clustered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars.

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