der the advantages of the
free library. For, as with the school, it is easy to show that mental
health and light are as primary interests of the community as material;
and that it is precisely because those most deficient are least sensible
of their defect that society must seek to remedy it. Mr. Spencer's
analogy between hunger for food and hunger for knowledge is utterly
fallacious. The physical appetite may be trusted to seek vigorously its
own supply; the intellectual appetite has most to be aroused where
intellectual starvation is most imminent; and it grows only by what it
feeds on. Men usually value most, indeed, what they work or pay for; but
it is precisely those who do not value good books at all who need to be
tempted and trained to their appreciation. And it is just the children
of those whose parents will not, or cannot, provide them wholesome
reading, that society cannot afford to let go wholly unprovided.

The smallest fee here proves an effective bar, as the experience of all
subscription libraries proves. When the Springfield (Mass.) library was
made free, its circulation was trebled the first year--though the fee
had been only one dollar--and in a few years rose six or seven fold.
"The Mercantile Library of Peoria, Ill.," says Mr. Crunden, "turned over
to the city and made free, notes an increase in ten years, of members
from two hundred and seventy-five to four thousand five hundred, and of
issues from fifteen thousand to ninety thousand." So always. If the
dollar fee were removed from the circulation of the books of our
Meadville City Library, for instance, within five years they would go
into fifteen hundred families instead of less than three hundred, as
now; and the added twelve hundred families would be the very ones where
the books would be of highest service. And, perhaps, more beneficent
still would be the influence upon the vastly larger number who would
frequent the library, and grow intelligent through the multiplied use of
its reading facilities, and the help of its valuable reference
department. The reaction upon the general intelligence of the community
would make itself felt in the increasing intelligence of its working men
and the higher standard of life this would bring among them. In short,
it would insure economic progress.

Besides the economic advantages, and much more important, the influence
of a well-furnished free library would tell in the training of citizens.
The discussion