les--sending out its books by the local provision dealer to its
remote and scattered constituents. There is the library of the great
city, with elaborate equipment and complex organization to meet a vast
and complex need. Such a library as you may find at Chicago; a city
which, though it has two great endowed reference libraries, still
considers its million and a half people entitled to a municipal
library, with a two million dollar building, studded with costly
mosaics, and aided by forty branches and stations in bringing the
books nearer each home. Or such a library as exists at Boston;
organized as a City Department, under Trustees appointed by the Mayor,
maintained, like the schools, or the police, or the fire department,
by general taxation; with a central building which has cost the city
two and one-half million dollars, with ten branch libraries and
seventeen delivery stations scattered through the city and reached
daily by its delivery wagons; with 700,000 books; and accommodations
for over 2,000 readers at one time; including in its equipment such
special departments as a bindery and a printing office; requiring for
its administration over 250 employes, and for its maintenance each
year a quarter of a million dollars, in addition to the proceeds of
endowments; and representing in its buildings, books and equipment an
investment of over five millions of dollars, the interest on which, at
four per cent., to the expenditure for maintenance, is equivalent to
an annual burden of $450,000 for its creation and support.

When this function was first proposed for a municipality, the argument
used was that in this country books had come to be the principal
instruments of education; that the community was already supporting a
public school system; that this system brought a youth to the threshold
of education and there left him; that it qualified him to use books, but
did nothing to put books within his reach; and finally that it was of
"paramount importance that the means of general information should be so
diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced
to read and understand questions going down to the very foundation of
social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we,
as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either
ignorantly or wisely."

A glance at the libraries now in operation in the United States shows
that the ends proposed for them fall far sh