Just here, however, I am met with a warning. I am bidden take heed. I am told that exactly because literature is not to all a good, but a good only to the select and favored few, because literature is aristocratic, not democratic; because it is a luxury, not a necessity; because it concerns not the average man, but the picked man, one in a thousand, not the thousand—exactly because of this, I am told, it is that literature has got to give way and let science, which is a universal interest, take its too long usurped place. Well, I stop to answer this challenge. I admit at once that, if such be the fact, if literature be a monopoly, and not a common good, then I lose my case. And I say more, then I ought to lose my case, and I am glad to lose my case. For I avow myself a democrat in this matter. I go with the people. I belong with the majority. I stand up for the benefit of the most. But is it true that literature is an exclusive, a seclusive thing? Is it true that the many can not enjoy it, do not enjoy it? Is not literature a general, a diffusive good? If not, then however great a good it may be to a few, I am not here to defend its cause. We are a popular association, this C. L. S. C., or we are nothing. If I did not believe literature to be a thing for everybody, I, as one among the Counselors of this organization, should favor a dismissal of literature from our plan and plead for the substitution of something else in its place that should be a thing for everybody. What is the fact? Why, the fact is that literature is the very atmosphere, the intellectual atmosphere, in which we all, not some of us, but all of us, live and breathe and have our being. We drew in this air as soon as we began to think. Long before we could read for ourselves, before even we could listen understandingly to the reading of others, we felt unconsciously, but most really, and most profoundly, the effect, the beneficial effect of literature. The home in which you were reared, the character and the spirit of the mother that gave you birth, that nurtured and tended your infancy—these were different, and they were better, because literature had done something to make them and mold them. And were they not literature, those lullabies that quieted us in our cradle, the fairy tales that fed the fancy of our wondering childhood, the stories from the Bible that expanded our infant minds to embrace the idea of a God, of a Savior, of a future life, of heaven, and of hell? Those men seem not to know what their words mean; those men who talk of expunging literature, and bringing up the new generations of mankind on science. Really to do what they say, but what surely they never could intelligently mean, would be to destroy for the whole civilized race of mankind the very grace and glory of life.