000,000 invested in buildings, with
$17,000,000 of endowments, and with over $6,000,000 of annual income. Of
these the free public libraries supported by general taxation number
less than 2,000, with 10,000,00 volumes, and with less than $3,500,000
of annual income. They are, however, increasing with disproportionate
and amazing rapidity. In Massachusetts, but 10 of the 353 cities and
towns, but three-fourths of one per cent. of the inhabitants now lack
them. One hundred and ten library buildings there have been the gift of
individuals. No form of private memorial is now more popular; no form of
municipal expenditure meets with readier assent. Nor are the initiative
and the expenditure left wholly to local enterprises. The Commonwealth
itself takes part: extending, through a State Commission, State aid in
the form of books and continuing counsel. And Massachusetts is but one
of eight States maintaining such commissions. New York State, in its
system of traveling libraries, has gone further still in supplementing
initial aid with a continuing supply of books, and even photographs and
lantern slides, purchased by the State and distributed through the
Regents of the State University from Albany to the remotest hamlet.

The first stage of all such legislation is an enabling act--authorizing
the establishment of a library by the local authorities; the next is an
act encouraging such establishment by bounties; and New Hampshire has
reached a third by a law actually mandatory, requiring the local
authorities to establish free libraries in proportion to their means and
the population to be served. This seems to mark the high-water mark of
confidence in the utility of these institutions. It indicates that free
public libraries are to be ranked with the common schools, as
institutions indispensable to good citizenship, whose establishment the
State for its own protection must require.

So the movement has progressed, until now these 2,000 public
libraries combined are sending out each year over 30 million books, to
do their work for good or ill in the homes of the United States. The
entire 2,000 result from one conviction and a uniform purpose. Yet
among them there is every variety in scope and in organization. There
is the hamlet library of a hundred volumes, open for a couple of hours
each week in some farm house, under a volunteer custodian, maintained
by the town, but enlisting private contribution through bazaars and
sociab