The demonstration is at hand. Let it be pressed upon our fellow citizens, and let them be shown the practical operation of the project you have in hand and the good it has accomplished, and the further good of which it is capable through their increased liberality, and it will be strange if they fail to respond generously to your appeal to put the city of New York in the front rank of the cities which have recognized the usefulness of the free circulating libraries. THE WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF ITS LIBRARY IN HARTFORD, CONN., JAN. 2, 1893. These addresses, by Charles Dudley Warner and Charles H. Clark, are reprinted from brief abstracts given in _The Library Journal_ of January, 1893. Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plainfield, Mass., Sept. 12, 1829 and graduated at Hamilton College in 1851. He practised law in Chicago in 1856-60 and in 1861 became managing editor of the Hartford, Conn., _Press_. In 1867 on its consolidation with the _Courant_, he became co-editor. He was made associate editor of _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884, and died at Hartford, Oct. 20, 1900. He was widely popular as an essayist, first gaining favorable notice by his "My Summer in a Garden." This building and its contents are contributory to the excellence and enjoyment of life exactly as Bushnall Park is--not merely that it is a place of rest and recreation, but it is a training in beauty, in the appreciation of nobleness, and in the public and private refinement. Culture is a plant of rather slow growth. I suppose there never was such a change wrought, almost instantaneously, in a people as was wrought in the American people by the opening and exhibition of the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Its effect was at once apparent everywhere. But knowledge precedes culture, culture being, after all, but another name for educational taste. Now this institution is simply a means for the culture of the city of Hartford, in all ways, because literature and art--not taken externally, but absorbed as a part of our lives, not only of knowledge, but of experience--are the things that make life worth living.