after all, is the supreme end of education? I state that we should teach
them to think with accuracy and with speed, but I doubt if there is one
who denies the supreme necessity of the building of character. That is
what is winning in the peaceful conflicts of commerce. If you care to
analyze how character is built, follow it back briefly. Character comes
from habits, and habits from actions repeated, and actions from a
motive, and a motive from reflection. What makes me reflect? What makes
you reflect? What is the cause? Isn't it something that you have read in
a book, a magazine, or a paper? So the genealogy is this: reading begets
reflection, reflection begets motive, motive begets action, and action
begets habit, and habit begets that supreme thing--character. So we have
come to recognize that if we are to accomplish the chief end that is
before the people, we must strive to control the reading for others.

Reading sometimes carries downhill, as it often carries upward, and
there is no way that we can reach the people except through the free
library and with proper help from the people.

What Atlanta wants to make out of her citizens is not to train privates,
but to train officers. If you go out on the streets you can find a
thousand men to do the work of a laborer, where you can find only a few
to do the work that will demand five or ten thousand dollars. The world
is looking for that class of men. It is the highest salaried man that is
the hardest to find. If you would buy a machine, there enters into it
the material that is in it; the process of manufacture throughout which
has transformed it, and then the approved fitness for performing its
functions. The same way with a man--the native that is manufactured;
then comes the experience which proves the fitness for his work; and you
pay the salary for these things. And by means of our schools and
libraries we must reach these girls and boys.

Thomas Edison and other great men say that their whole lives are
governed from reading a single book. So the province of the library is
to amuse, to inform and inspire. We have the old proverbs, As free as
air; As free as water; but the new one that is important to the race is,
As free as knowledge. The people of this state cannot afford to have any
boy in Georgia who is anxious to know more, how to make his life more
valuable, who wants inspiration and is ready to read, and not furnish it
to him. Education is the chief conc