and money directed towards this
object are confined to a circle of persons far too narrow, and that the
public encouragement and aid have been greatly disproportioned to
private endeavor.

The city of New York has never shown herself willing to be behind other
cities in such work as is done by our Free Circulating Library, and
while her people are much engrossed in business activity and enterprise
they have never yet turned away from a cause once demonstrated to them
to be so worthy and useful as this.

The demonstration is at hand. Let it be pressed upon our fellow
citizens, and let them be shown the practical operation of the project
you have in hand and the good it has accomplished, and the further good
of which it is capable through their increased liberality, and it will
be strange if they fail to respond generously to your appeal to put the
city of New York in the front rank of the cities which have recognized
the usefulness of the free circulating libraries.

THE WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM

ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF ITS LIBRARY IN HARTFORD, CONN., JAN. 2,
1893.

These addresses, by Charles Dudley Warner and Charles H.
Clark, are reprinted from brief abstracts given in _The
Library Journal_ of January, 1893.

Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plainfield, Mass., Sept.
12, 1829 and graduated at Hamilton College in 1851. He
practised law in Chicago in 1856-60 and in 1861 became
managing editor of the Hartford, Conn., _Press_. In 1867 on
its consolidation with the _Courant_, he became co-editor.
He was made associate editor of _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884,
and died at Hartford, Oct. 20, 1900. He was widely popular
as an essayist, first gaining favorable notice by his "My
Summer in a Garden."

This building and its contents are contributory to the excellence and
enjoyment of life exactly as Bushnall Park is--not merely that it is a
place of rest and recreation, but it is a training in beauty, in the
appreciation of nobleness, and in the public and private refinement.
Culture is a plant of rather slow growth. I suppose there never was such
a change wrought, almost instantaneously, in a people as was wrought in
the American people by the opening and exhibition of the Philadelphia
Centennial of 1876. Its effect was at once apparent everywhere. But
knowledge precedes culture, culture being, after all, but another name
for educational taste.

Now this institutio