, which each of us knows, is
individual and personal. Standing to-day in the home of a collection
which, we trust, is to be one of the larger libraries of learning,
landmark, and lighthouse at once, recording the past and lighting the
pathless future, this individual and personal use is inevitable before
us, cramping and limiting our conception of the relations, the aims, and
the ends of a great library. Its very beginnings about us raise a doubt
as to the wisdom of these endless accumulations of print. The peril of
the mere aggregate was, perhaps, never plainer than in these days, when
the great glacier of democracy slides on, making high places low and low
high--one would be glad to believe, preparing the pathway of a new
lordship of learning, but one is fain to fear making easy the track and
broad the road for an evil over-lordship of mediocrity in learning and
in literature. Our own democracy we are assured, has ceased to read
anything but fiction, and demands this, not book-meal, but piece-meal,
in monthly, weekly, or even daily doses.

The vast book-stack of the modern library, in which volumes lose their
individuality as completely as urns in a columbarium, and like them but
too often hold naught but dead and forgotten dust, is far removed from
the still air of delightful studies which we associate with our own
loved libraries. "I seldom go there," says Emerson of the University
Library he used, "without renewing my conviction that the best of it all
is already within the four walls of my study at home." The ablest of
American editors recently urged in the most brilliant of American
newspapers that the Library of Congress should be reduced to a sound
working collection of 50,000 volumes, and the rest of its treasures
dissipated or stored. I have myself heard the suggestion in regard to
this library, and from one of academic connection, that its future
usefulness would be increased if its future bulk were restricted.
Whether we listen to the philosopher, the editor, or the university
trustee; whatever fanned and winnowed opinions we apply to the great
threshing floor on whose round the feet of the ages slowly tread out the
wheat from the chaff in the garnered harvest of human thought, the
remnant will be small--measured by high thought or narrow utility. The
mere mass of our libraries already overtaxes our utmost ability to
classify, to catalogue, and to administer. As we watch their bulk grow,
on whatever side of