authenticated instance exists of an individual
beginning life as a newsboy or an elevator-boy, and through his use of a
public library finding his intellectual powers unfolding until he has
entered one of the learned professions. The relation of the library
system to the school system opens an almost boundless field of thought,
and it is a fact of deep significance that the profound principle
involved in it, after having engaged the attention of English and
American libraries for years, has been recognized in the educational
steps recently taken by the government of Japan, where the two systems
are placed on a plane of equality. In the experience of one of the
American libraries already referred to, almost the chief hope of the
library for the future is placed upon "a class of readers," every year
largely increasing in numbers, who comprise the "graduates from the
various institutions of learning" in the city, and whose "lines of study
and reading" "may be characterized as a carrying forward of those
impulses in the direction of right reading which were received in school
and college." The library has a no less direct relation to the needs and
ambitions of those who have received the invaluable training of "the
practical duties of the world," to use Mr. O'Brien's phrase, and it
responds with equal readiness to these. There is concentrated in the
contemptuous phrase, "book-learning," a popular judgment of condemnation
which is for the most part just, on the spurious variety of knowledge
which knows the expression of certain principles in books, but knows
nothing of their practical embodiment in the life and work of this
world. We are glad to observe that Mr. O'Brien's antipathy to this
pseudo-knowledge is almost as profound as our own, but his expression of
it seems singularly out of place in a philippic against public
libraries; for one will seek far before finding an institution more
perfectly suited to be a corrective of such a tendency than the modern
public library. Does any one claim that the public school system
sometimes has an unfortunate tendency to repress individuality and turn
out a set of pupils of uniform mould? If so, the public library supplies
a means of supplementing and complementing this uniformity by its
infinite variety and universality, and it is continually doing this,
indeed. Does any one regret that the school system at its best reaches
but a fraction of the population and that fraction for but a