Under this Department of Education, with its grades, the School, the College and the University, the Library is assigned the last section. It belongs there in chronological order of development as an active factor in popular instruction and enlightenment; and, furthermore, the presentation of its claims and functions comes naturally after those of the other factors in education, because it is an essential coadjutor and supplement to each and all. It is a summary and a climax. There have always been libraries, and they have always been a factor in education; but the public, free, tax-supported library is but just half a century old, and could hardly be considered out of the long clothes of infancy till the year 1876; while its general acceptance as an essential supplement to the public school and a co-ordinate factor with the college and university may be considered the accomplishment of the last decade. There are still teachers who look on general reading as an interference with school work and an extra burden on their shoulders. We start, then, with the axiomatic proposition that all human progress depends on education; and no elaborate demonstration is necessary to show that the library is an essential factor in every grade of education. Higher education, certainly, cannot dispense with the library. The well-known dictum of Carlyle, "The true university of modern times is a collection of books," was accepted as a striking statement of a man with rhetorical habit, without, perhaps, a realization of its full significance. It has been recently expanded into a more express and specific tribute to the importance of the library in university education. In an address delivered in St. Louis and afterwards published in the _North American Review_, President Harper said: "The place occupied by libraries and laboratories in the educational work of to-day, as compared with that of the past, is one of commanding importance. Indeed, the library and the laboratory have already practically revolutionized the methods of higher education. In the really modern institution, the chief building is the library. It is the center of institutional activity.... That factor of college work, the library, fifty years ago almost unknown, to-day already the center of the institution's intellectual activity, half a century hence, with its sister, the laboratory, almost equally unknown fifty years ago, will have absorbed all else and will have become the institution itself." As to the value of the library in elementary education Doctor Harris says: "What there is good in our American system points towards the preparation of the pupil for the independent study of the book by himself. It points towards acquiring the ability of self-education by means of the library."