e
high sense of honor of one of his heirs is to be joined with the
invaluable Astor Library, and the choice Lennox Reference Library, and
all made free and available to the public--a property valued in the
aggregate at eight million dollars. These events, together with the
recent founding of the Carnegie free libraries in Pittsburg and
Allegheny, the not very remote establishment of the Enoch Pratt Free
Library in Baltimore, and the addition by Mr. Henry C. Lea to the
splendid Ridgway foundation in Philadelphia, constitute a series of
brilliant triumphs for the free public library, unparalleled in the
history of educational institutions, and seldom equalled, I must think,
in the intellectual progress of civilization.

Nor do these metropolitan successes indicate, after all, the most
essential advance. The frequency with which private beneficence is
coming to the aid of public enterprise in smaller cities and country
towns, for the establishment and increase of these libraries; the recent
notable instances of stimulative auxiliary legislation; and the growth
of intelligent interest in new and widely scattered sections of the
civilized world, are equally significant, and perhaps even more widely
beneficent. It is the era of the free public library; and it is of
special interest to us to see that our community and our commonwealth
are moving in accord with this tide of new feeling and enterprise
concerning it.

Of special interest, I say, to us as Pennsylvanians; for we are glad to
remember that it is here that the first impulse was given to the
foundation of the system of circulating libraries, the development of
which is the free public library in England and America. Benjamin
Franklin, after considerable effort, founded in 1732 the Philadelphia
Library Company, the "mother," as he himself calls it, "of all the
subscription libraries in North America."

This library which Franklin started for the advantage of himself and his
fifty young business associates, in the early time, when, as he says,
"there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the
southward of Boston," and when most of the books had to be imported from
England, was followed soon by the establishment of more ambitious
similar libraries in Newport (1747) and Hartford (1774); and later in
many other places in England and this country. These were called public
libraries, though books could only be taken out by subscribers.
Probably, howeve