ery rapidly. The great problem of the day is,
therefore, to carry on the education after the elementary steps have
been taken in the free public schools. There are numerous agencies at
work in this direction--reading rooms, reference and lending libraries,
museums, summer, vacation and night schools, correspondence and other
forms of extension teaching; but by far the greatest agent is good
reading. An educational system which contents itself with teaching to
read and then fails to see that the best reading is provided, when
undesirable reading is so cheap and plentiful as to be a constant menace
to the public good, is as inconsistent and absurd as to teach our
children the expert use of the knife, fork and spoon, and then provide
them with no food. The most important movement before the professional
educators to-day, is the broadening going on so rapidly in their duties
to their profession and to the public. Too many have thought of their
work as limited to schools for the young during a short period of
tuition. The true conception is that we should be responsible for higher
as well as elementary education, for adults as well as for children, for
educational work in the homes as well as in the schoolhouses, and during
life as well as for a limited course. In a nutshell, the motto of the
extended work should be "higher education for adults, at home, during
life."

MELVIL DEWEY.

THE FREEDOM OF BOOKS

The free town library is wholly a product of the last half century. It
is the crowning creature of democracy for its own higher culture. There
is nothing conceivable to surpass it as an agency in popular education.
Schools, colleges, lectures, classes, clubs and societies, scientific
and literary, are tributaries to it--primaries, feeders. It takes up the
work of all of them to utilize it, to carry it on, and make more of it.
Future time will perfect it, and will perfect the institutions out of
which and over which it has grown; but it is not possible for the future
to bring any new gift of enlightenment to men that will be greater, in
kind, than the free diffusion of thought and knowledge as stored in the
better literature of the world.

The true literature that we garner in our libraries is the deathless
thought, the immortal truth, the imperishable quickenings and
revelations which genius--the rare gift to now and then one of the human
race--has been frugally, steadily planting in the fertile soil of
written speec