in more than once--a collection of about a thousand volumes of
Public Documents, and books of similar character, accompanied by a
letter, urging the establishment of a public library.

To HON. EDWARD EVERETT.

Bellows Falls, Vermont, July 14, 1851.

MY DEAR EVERETT,--I have seen with much gratification from
time to time, within the last year, and particularly in your
last letter on the subject, that you interest yourself in
the establishment of a public library in Boston;--I mean a
library open to all the citizens, and from which all, under
proper restrictions, can take out books. Such, at least, I
understand to be your plan; and I have thought, more than
once, that I would talk with you about it, but accident has
prevented it. However, perhaps a letter is as good on all
accounts, and better as a distinct memorandum of what I
mean.

It has seemed to me, for many years, that such a free
public library, if adapted to the wants of our people, would
be the crowning glory of our public schools. But I think it
important that it should be adapted to our peculiar
character; that is, that it should come in at the end of our
system of free instruction, and be fitted to continue and
increase the effects of that system by the self-culture that
results from reading.

The great obstacle to this with us is not--as it is in
Prussia and elsewhere--a low condition of the mass of the
people, condemning them, as soon as they escape from school,
and often before it, to such severe labor, in order to
procure the coarsest means of physical subsistence, that
they have no leisure for intellectual culture, and soon lose
all taste for it. Our difficulty is, to furnish means
specially fitted to encourage a love for reading, to create
an appetite for it, which the schools often fail to do, and
then to adapt these means to its gratification. That an
appetite for reading can be very widely excited is plain,
from what the cheap publications of the last twenty years
have accomplished, gradually raising the taste from such
poor trash as the novels with which they began, up to the
excellent and valuable works of all sorts which now flood
the country, and are read by the middling classes
everywhere, and in New England, I think, even by a majority
of the people.[2]

Now what seems to me to