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
conten