ing eighty or a hundred
lads and young men quietly reading, or playing backgammon or checkers.
The room answers exactly its object as a place of innocent amusement and
improvement, competing with the liquor-saloons. The citizens of the
neighborhood have testified to its excellent moral influences on the
young men.

A similar room was opened in the First Ward by the kind aid of the late
Mr. J. Couper Lord, and the good influences of the place have been much
increased by the exertions of Mr. D. E. Hawley and a committee of
gentlemen.

There are other Reading-rooms connected with the Boys' Lodging-houses.
Most of them are doing an invaluable work; the First ward room
especially being a centre for cricket-clubs and various social reunions
of the laboring classes, and undoubtedly saving great numbers of young
men from the most dangerous temptations. Mr. Hawley has inaugurated here
also a very useful course of popular lectures to the laboring people.

This Reading-room is crowded with young men every night, of the class
who should be reached, and who would otherwise spend their leisure hours
at the liquor-saloons. Many of them have spoken with much gratitude of
the benefit the place has been to them.

The Reading-rooms connected with Boys' Lodging-houses, though sometimes
doing well, are not uniformly successful, perhaps from the fact that
workingmen do not like to be associated with homeless boys.

Besides those connected with the Children's Aid Society, the City
Mission and various churches have founded others, so that now the Free
Reading-room is recognized as one of the means for improving the
"dangerous classes," as much as the Sunday School, Chapel, or Mission.

The true theory of the formation of the Reading-room is undoubtedly the
inducing the laboring class to engage in the matter themselves, and then
to assist them in meeting the expenses. But the lowest poor and the
young men who frequent the grog-shops are so indifferent to mental
improvement, and so seldom associate themselves for any virtuous object,
that it is extremely difficult to induce them to combine for this.

Moreover, as they rise in the social scale, they find organizations
ready to hand, like the "Cooper Union," where Reading-rooms and
Libraries are provided gratuitously. For the present, the Reading-room
may be looked upon, like the Public School, as a means of improvement
offered by society, in its own Interest, to all.