open avenues to knowledge, than any
other vocation whatever. His daily quests in pursuit of information to
lay before others, bring him acquainted with passages that are full of
endless suggestion for himself. He may not be able to pursue any of these
avenues at the moment; but he should make a mental or a written note of
them, for future benefit. His daily business being learning, why should
he not in time, become learned? There are, of course, among the
infinitude of questions, that come before the librarian, some that are
really insoluble problems. One of these is to be found among the topics
of inquiry I just now suggested; namely: what is the aggregate wealth of
Great Britain, or that of other nations? This is a question frequently
asked by inquiring Congressmen, who imagine that an answer may readily be
had from one of those gifted librarians who is invested with that
apocryphal attribute, commonly called omniscience. But the inquirer is
suddenly confronted by the fact (and a very stubborn fact it is) that not
a single foreign nation has ever taken any census of wealth whatever. In
Great Britain (about which country inquiry as to the national resources
more largely centres) the government wisely lets alone the attempt to
tabulate the value of private wealth, knowing that such an object is
utterly impracticable.

But, while the British census makes no attempt at estimating the property
of the people, the independent estimates of statistical writers vary
hopelessly and irreconcilably. Mr. J. R. McCulloch, one of the foremost
accredited writers on economic science, lays it down as a dictum, that
"sixty years is the shortest time in which the capital of an old and
densely-peopled country can be expected to be doubled." Yet Joseph Lowe
assumes the wealth of the United Kingdom to have doubled in eighteen
years, from 1823 to 1841; while George R. Porter, in his
widely-accredited book on the "Progress of the Nation," and Leoni Levi, a
publicist of high reputation, make out, (by combining their estimates)
that the private wealth of England increased fifty per cent. in seventeen
years, at which rate it would double in about twenty-nine years, instead
of sixty, as laid down by Mr. McCulloch. Mr. Levi calculates the
aggregate private wealth of Great Britain in 1858, at $29,178,000,000,
being a fraction less than the guesses of the census enumerators at the
national wealth of the United States, twelve years later, in 1870. Can