Already, library administrators and far-sighted educators and publicists foresee a time when it will be as compulsory for towns to establish and support free public libraries as it now is compulsory for them to establish and support free public schools. Massachusetts, perhaps, approaches nearer that ideal now than any other State, only ten of its 353 cities and towns being without public libraries. Fortunately for the sociologist, the historian, the economist, and the lover of literature, the inhabitants of New England have not failed to chronicle in various forms and ways the deeds and thoughts of their contemporaries. Thus there is a large class of historic documents of which Bradford’s history of _Plimoth Plantation_ is the _magnum opus_. Then there are innumerable town histories,--of which the four-volume history of Hingham, Massachusetts, is a model,--family genealogies, sermons, diaries, volumes of correspondence, such as that which passed between John Adams and his wife, memorial addresses, such as Emerson and G. W. Curtis delivered at Concord, and Webster and Robert C. Winthrop at Plymouth, which inform and often inspire all who patiently explore their contents. Last, but not least, there are the products of New England’s representative authors, who in prose or poetry have recorded indelibly the higher life of their own or of passing generations. In short, a literature-loving people has given birth to literature, and the New England town of the past can never totally fade out of the memory of future generations so long as men and women are left to read the poetry of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Aldrich, Lowell’s _Biglow Papers_, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Oldtown Folks_ and _A Minister’s Wooing_, the short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Maria L. Pool, and Jane G. Austin, the prose romances of Hawthorne and F. J. Stimson, and the histories of Palfrey, Bancroft, Parkman, and Fiske.