the last
newest experiment station of the world--is a failure.

It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a
point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have
inadvertently overlooked.

If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a
Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be
called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of
inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this
temperament in others--men in all specialities, in all walks of life,
who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do
them--and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and
another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are
doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--he would
soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in
thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men,
of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as
compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless,
innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing.
Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say
that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the
great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine,
and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his
fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to
find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself
for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that
boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five
hours a day to pick him out, it would be--well, all I can say is, all
those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings,
would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that
boy!

There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation
in his pocket, a system of railroads--a boy with a national cure for
tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody--there is a boy with
cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with
mountainsful of forests in his heart.

This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big,
stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar
bodies, their white pillars and th