. With this little fund we began. The books were
imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to
the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if
not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was
imitated by other towns and in other provinces. The libraries were
augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people,
having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became
better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by
strangers to be better instructed, and more intelligent, than people of
the same rank generally are in other countries."

I think you will agree with me that this is a very striking bit of
testimony, too much so to permit us to hurry past it. Note these few
things about it.

In the first place, that device of Franklin's, started in 1731--what
does it really signify in our history? It signifies this. It signifies a
new departure for mankind--the application of the democratic spirit to
the distribution of intellectual advantages. These things called
books--these bewitched and bewitching fabrics of paper and ink, which
somehow contain the accumulated thought of all nations and of all
centuries, and can communicate to us the noblest pleasures and the most
godlike powers--these potent things, in all the ages before, had been
accessible only to some few fortunate human beings--to a privileged
class--to rich men who wished them--to scholars who could win their way
to them--in short, to an aristocracy of intellectual privileges. But in
1731, by that modest device of Benjamin Franklin, the democratic
spirit--the modern humane spirit--the spirit which in its true nature is
a levelling spirit only in this grand sense that it levels upward and
not downward, and raises the general average of human intelligence and
felicity--this benign and mighty democratic spirit, I say, which was
then marching with gentle but invincible footsteps along all avenues and
pathways of modern life, and was laying its miraculous touch on church
and state, on kings and priests and peasants, on the laws and law-makers
and law-breakers, on all the old activities of society, on the old
adjustments of human relations, that spirit then began to touch this
relation also, the relation of man to the superb and royal realm of
books. And the first effect of that touch was what? It was enlargement,
liberalization, extension of intellectual o