I am a millionaire," he said, "but I want to tell you
that I would give half I have to-day for a decent education."

Many a rich man has confessed to confidential friends and his own heart
that he would give much of his wealth,--all, if necessary,--to see his
son a manly man, free from the habits which abundance has formed and
fostered till they have culminated in sin and degradation and perhaps
crime; and has realized that, in all his ample provision, he has failed
to provide that which might have saved his son and himself from loss
and torture,--good books.

There is a wealth within the reach of the poorest mechanic and
day-laborer in this country that kings in olden times could not
possess, and that is the wealth of a well-read, cultured mind. In this
newspaper age, this age of cheap books and periodicals, there is no
excuse for ignorance, for a coarse, untrained mind. To-day no one is
so handicapped, if he have health and the use of his faculties, that he
can not possess himself of wealth that will enrich his whole life, and
enable him to converse and mingle with the most cultured people. No
one is so poor but that it is possible for him to lay hold of that
which will broaden his mind, which will inform and improve him, and
lift him out of the brute stage of existence into their god-like realm
of knowledge.

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montague;
"nor any pleasure so lasting." Good books elevate the character,
purify the taste, _take the attractiveness out of low pleasures_, and
lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living.

"A great part of what the British spend on books," says Sir John
Lubbock, "they save in prisons and police."

It seems like a miracle that the poorest boy can converse freely with
the greatest philosophers and scientists, statesmen, warriors, authors
of all time with little expense, that the inmates of the humblest cabin
may follow the stories of the nations, the epochs of history, the story
of liberty, the romance of the world, and the course of human progress.

Have you just been to a well educated sharp-sighted employer to find
work? You did not need to be at any trouble to tell him the names of
the books you have read, because they have left their indelible mark
upon your face and your speech. Your pinched, starved vocabulary, your
lack of polish, your slang expressions, tell him of the trash you have
given your precious time to. He knows th