better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed, and more intelligent, than people of the same rank generally are in other countries." I think you will agree with me that this is a very striking bit of testimony, too much so to permit us to hurry past it. Note these few things about it. In the first place, that device of Franklin's, started in 1731--what does it really signify in our history? It signifies this. It signifies a new departure for mankind--the application of the democratic spirit to the distribution of intellectual advantages. These things called books--these bewitched and bewitching fabrics of paper and ink, which somehow contain the accumulated thought of all nations and of all centuries, and can communicate to us the noblest pleasures and the most godlike powers--these potent things, in all the ages before, had been accessible only to some few fortunate human beings--to a privileged class--to rich men who wished them--to scholars who could win their way to them--in short, to an aristocracy of intellectual privileges. But in 1731, by that modest device of Benjamin Franklin, the democratic spirit--the modern humane spirit--the spirit which in its true nature is a levelling spirit only in this grand sense that it levels upward and not downward, and raises the general average of human intelligence and felicity--this benign and mighty democratic spirit, I say, which was then marching with gentle but invincible footsteps along all avenues and pathways of modern life, and was laying its miraculous touch on church and state, on kings and priests and peasants, on the laws and law-makers and law-breakers, on all the old activities of society, on the old adjustments of human relations, that spirit then began to touch this relation also, the relation of man to the superb and royal realm of books. And the first effect of that touch was what? It was enlargement, liberalization, extension of intellectual opportunity for man simply as man. Hitherto books had been the privilege of the privileged class. In effect, Franklin says: They shall be so no more. In this year 1731 I set agoing a device concerning books which shall abolish the privileged class by making all classes privileged, and shall finally result in placing the blessings of books within the reach of all.