ll teachers who look on general reading as an
interference with school work and an extra burden on their shoulders.

We start, then, with the axiomatic proposition that all human progress
depends on education; and no elaborate demonstration is necessary to
show that the library is an essential factor in every grade of
education.

Higher education, certainly, cannot dispense with the library. The
well-known dictum of Carlyle, "The true university of modern times is a
collection of books," was accepted as a striking statement of a man with
rhetorical habit, without, perhaps, a realization of its full
significance. It has been recently expanded into a more express and
specific tribute to the importance of the library in university
education. In an address delivered in St. Louis and afterwards published
in the _North American Review_, President Harper said:

"The place occupied by libraries and laboratories in the educational
work of to-day, as compared with that of the past, is one of commanding
importance. Indeed, the library and the laboratory have already
practically revolutionized the methods of higher education. In the
really modern institution, the chief building is the library. It is the
center of institutional activity.... That factor of college work, the
library, fifty years ago almost unknown, to-day already the center of
the institution's intellectual activity, half a century hence, with its
sister, the laboratory, almost equally unknown fifty years ago, will
have absorbed all else and will have become the institution itself."

As to the value of the library in elementary education Doctor Harris
says:

"What there is good in our American system points towards the
preparation of the pupil for the independent study of the book by
himself. It points towards acquiring the ability of self-education by
means of the library."

I might quote similar utterances from many other eminent educators as to
the value--the necessity--of the library in early education; but I can
think of no stronger summing-up of the subject, nor from higher
authority, than this statement from President Eliot:

"From the total training during childhood there should result in the
child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should direct
and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling which
results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or
eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main e