But there is one factor in the life of very many of the New England towns to-day that cannot be passed by without some allusion. It is the town or city library. In many instances the gift of some private donor, who was either born in the town, and making a home and fortune elsewhere desired to testify that he was not unmindful of ancestral environment and of youthful privileges, or else accumulated a fortune in the town and desired both to perpetuate his memory and to render a public service, the library building usually stands as a token of that marked interest in public education and public welfare which Americans of wealth reveal by gifts, generous to a degree unknown elsewhere in Christendom, competent European judges being witnesses. Appleton’s _Annual Encyclopedia_ records a total of $27,000,000 given to religious, educational, and philanthropic institutions in the United States, in sums of $5000 or more, by individuals, as donations or bequests during the year 1896. In this list are recorded gifts, amounting to $195,000, to establish or to endow town libraries in New England. Sometimes the major portion of the contents of the library building is also the gift of the generous donor of the edifice, but, usually, the town assumes responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the library, deriving the necessary income from appropriations voted by the citizens in town-meetings or by aldermen and councilmen, members of the local legislature, and assessed and collected _pro rata_ according to the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings, and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854, Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847, proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book _Methods of Social Reform_, “there is probably no mode of expending public money which gives a more extraordinary and immediate return in utility and enjoyment.”