ings, about the country, unmanned,
inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums
of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the
policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them--with all
this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or
how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting
about for himself? He could only be hunted out by people all wrought
through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to
find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy--by some special
kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or
by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about
and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this
boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere
getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them
about thickly, among the books in his libraries--those huge anatomies
and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great
literary steel-works--men would soon begin to be discovered, to be
created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now....

Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at
the windows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks
of learning on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary people
that dribble in from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down
listless in them--in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you
never thought that somewhere all about them, somewhere in this same
library, there must be some white, silent, sunny country of the future,
full of children and of singing, full of something very different from
these iron walls of wisdom? And have you never thought what it would
mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties for people
among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the
books in it, became, as it were, wired throughout with live, splendid,
delighted men and women, to make connections, to establish the current
between the people and the books, to discover the people one by one and
follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives, and take out
the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers and poets, and the
Kossuths, Caesars, the Florence Nightingales...?

It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small,
invisible, per