aries.

"Andrew Carnegie was a poor boy, enjoying none of the advantages
and opportunities which are afforded by a good library. He missed
in his early life the opportunity for culture which is now obtained
through the facilities supplied by libraries in the towns and
cities. He knew that there was no other agency so valuable for
the purpose of spreading culture among the people as the public
library. No word so precisely describes the influence of good
reading as does the word 'culture'. Emerson tells us that the word
of ambition of the present day is 'culture.'

"Andrew Carnegie, the great leader of the industrial world, desiring
to give to the young men and the young women of this day an
opportunity for education, for culture, whose value to the young
he realizes so well, has devoted the enormous fortune of over one
hundred million dollars for the founding of public libraries. . . .

"There should be no pleasure like the pleasure derived from reading
a good book. Emerson, expressing our debt to a book says: 'Let
us not forget the genial, miraculous, we have known to proceed from
a book. We go musing into the vaults of day and night; no
constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points,
the roses brick-colored leaves; and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and
wagons creak along the road. We return to the house and take up
Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages, and lo,
the air swims with life, secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite
us on every hand, life is made of them. Such is our debt to a
book.'

"The founding of public libraries is the surest mark of advanced
civilization. The origin of libraries is lost in the dim twilight
of the early ages. When they commenced, how they commenced, we do
not know; but we have authentic records that centuries before the
Christian era the temples of those countries of the East where
civilization had made the greatest advances, contained libraries
of clay tablets, carefully shelved in regular order. Among the
Greeks, private libraries existed at least four hundred years before
the birth of Christ. The Roman Caesars returning from conquest to
the development of the arts of peace, established libraries in the
then great Capital of the World.

"But the United States is pre-eminently the home of the free public
libraries, supported by taxation. This country has more free public
libraries than any other country in the world.

"What a g