ting and refining as
the public library. Memorial libraries are therefore very abundant, and
as expense has not been spared in the erection of such memorials, many
of our towns, even the smaller ones, are ornamented by library buildings
which are gems of architecture.... The fact remains, with all its
significance, that about the public library cluster naturally the
affections and the interest of the community. In its endowment, on the
one hand by private beneficence, and on the other by public taxation, is
illustrated that collaboration of the rich and the poor in the pursuit
of the highest ends which has in it the promise, and perhaps the
potency, of the solution of vexing social questions."

The remembrance that these statements are only locally accepted, and
that large portions of England and the United States have hardly moved
toward the establishment of public libraries, may prompt a consideration
of certain objections which are still sometimes urged. Civilization
accepts its most benignant and effective agencies of progress only under
protest; and it is not, therefore, wholly inexplicable that fifty years
of unmixed and increasing success should have left some excellent and
otherwise intelligent people unconvinced of the beneficence of the free
public library. A friend of mine was enthusiastically setting forth the
advantages of such libraries, and their rapid multiplication and growing
service in New England, at the dinner table of one of the most
distinguished, philosophic, and progressive of contemporary Englishmen;
and was not a little surprised to be cut short with the decided comment,
"I do not believe in it." The Englishman's fastidious preference for
high fences and compartment railway carriages pervades all his
intellectual conceptions also; and makes him impervious even to Stanley
Jevons's overwhelming demonstration of the moral, social, and economic
utility of the free public library; impervious even to the appeal that
ignorance and narrow intellectual opportunity must be supposed to make
upon enlightened philanthropy.

Mr. Herbert Spencer and the individualists oppose to the public
library, supported by taxation, their wellworn declamation about the
injustice of making one man pay for another man's culture and amusement;
and urge the dictum of _laissez faire_ in civilization and government.
But as the post-office and the public school have survived their
onslaughts we may not feel compelled to surren