“The farther one travels from New England, the more surely does one find public sentiment indifferent to these matters, and whole communities preferring to tax themselves for the adornment of their cities, rather than to provide every poor man with books. Books are considered a luxury, not a necessity; to be indulged in only by those who can afford to pay for them. LEARNING FOR ALL was the idea of the men who made the North what it is. Learning for the few was the idea of the men who made the South what it is. And the men of this generation are reaping the harvest of the seed which those men sowed. “Now I propose, as soon as practicable, to assist in putting into several thousand little communities in the West and South either a free reading-room or a free circulating library, or both, thinking that it will be the best possible use to which money can be put. “Perhaps it may be wondered at that I do not spend these millions in the direction of Home Missionary work. I have several reasons for not doing so, although I am heartily in sympathy with it. Never was there nobler, more self-denying and more fruitful labor than that of the overworked men and women in the Home Missionary field. But, in the first place, there are one hundred needed where one can be found to go. The religious denomination in which I was reared graduates but about one hundred students from all its theological seminaries every year, scarcely enough, one would think, to supply the vacancies in the pulpits of the East, to say nothing of the West, and I presume the same is nearly true of other denominations which I should be quite as ready to help as my own. “The library can never take the place of the church, but I am convinced that in many communities the provision of a comfortable, tastefully furnished room, filled with periodicals, giving to every one access to the best literary, political, scientific, and religious thought of our time, will do quite as much for the morals of a town as anything that could be devised. “Unlike a church, it will be open every day in the week. It will be a counter attraction to the street and the saloon, and if there is a circulating library as well as a reading-room, it will serve to stimulate and open a larger life to every one who takes a book from it. The home missionary shall not be lacking, but she shall appear under the guise of a librarian instead of a preacher. “In regions where there is a large proportion of foreigners, there shall be books and periodicals in their native tongues. Few who have not looked into the matter realize the terrible mental strain to the mind of the immigrant from the disruption of old associations and the necessity, in middle life, of adapting himself to utterly new conditions, in a land where his language is unspoken. Many succumb to this, and the statistics of the numbers of OUR FOREIGN-BORN INSANE are startling.