sentence in the presidential address of Henry M. Utley
before the American Library Association at its Denver
conference of 1895. President Utley himself gave it no
title, but it is an examination of the claims of the library
to public support, with a conclusion that those claims are
justified only by regarding the library as an educational
institution, using this term in its broadest sense.

Henry Munson Utley was born at Plymouth, Mich., Aug. 5,
1836. He served on the staff of the Detroit _Free Press_ in
1861-66, was city editor of the _Post_ and _Post-Tribune_
until 1881, and then, after holding the secretaryship of the
Detroit Board of Education, became in 1885 librarian of the
Public Library, in which post he served until his death on
Feb. 16, 1917, becoming librarian emeritus in 1913.

We are met for the seventeenth Conference of the American Library
Association in the Capital city of the Centennial State. It is a
pleasing co-incidence that the Association and the State celebrate the
same natal year. Within the memory of some of us the whole region of
which this city is now the metropolis was a wilderness. The century was
fairly begun when Lieut. Pike led his little band to the sources of the
Arkansas and made his futile attempt to scale the lofty peak which now
bears his name. Forty years later came the explorations of Fremont, and
then fifteen years elapsed before the tide of immigration set in. The
desert of that day has been converted into prosperous farms. Thriving
towns have sprung up in the mountain fastnesses, at the gateway to which
sits this Queen City of the plains, displaying all the evidences of
wealth, culture, and refinement to be found in the proud cities to the
eastward.

This rapid and wonderful transformation has been the work of human hands
guided by intelligent brains and an indomitable spirit of pluck and
perseverance. We are accustomed to think of this combination as purely
American. In many of its characteristics it certainly is so. And in no
respect more distinctively so than in the cause in which we are most
interested. Not all the older commonwealths, even on this side of the
Atlantic, have yet accepted the theory that the education of the citizen
is the concern of the state. But in all this newer portion of our
country this doctrine has been incorporated into the fundamental law.
The ordinance of 1787 for the government of the t