The relative cheapness of securing this means of general culture and enjoyment, this efficient antidote to vice and ignorance, is strikingly shown by comparing its cost with other items of governmental expenditure, and the statistics of national luxuries and vices. The eighty-six free libraries in the large cities of Great Britain cost not more than half a million dollars per year--one fifth the cost of a first class ironclad. The statistics I have given show that the cost of the two war vessels just voted by Congress might be abundantly sufficient to insure the organization on the Massachusetts plan of a free library in every village and country town of the United States, not now accessible to such a library. The expenditure for drink, for horse-racing, or even for tobacco, for a single year, would royally equip and endow a public library for every thousand people now without such privileges. As post-office savings banks are, wherever established, a mighty engine for teaching thrift, as public parks are an incalculable source of health and enjoyment in our cities, so the public library, "the free literary park," as Jevons calls it, is a most effective agency for the promotion of culture and civilization. In the year 1851, George Ticknor, the distinguished author of the "History of Spanish Literature" and a benefactor of the Boston Public Library, wrote to Edward Everett: "I would establish a library which differs from all free libraries yet attempted; I mean one in which any popular books tending to moral and intellectual improvement shall be furnished in such numbers that many persons can be reading the same book at the same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the pleasant literature of the day, shall be made accessible to the whole people when they most care for it--that is, when it is fresh and new. I would thus by following the popular taste--unless it should demand something injurious--create a real appetite for healthy reading. This appetite once formed will take care of itself. It will in a great majority of cases demand better and better books."