And what is true of the leaders of that great act of national transmigration is true also of the men of less note who followed in it. The first American immigrants were reading immigrants--immigrants who brought in their hands not only axes and shovels, but books. Their coming hither was due to the restlessness inflicted by the possession of ideas. Books were to them a necessary part of the outfit for the voyage and the settlement. And so rare and so precious were books in those days that they were cherished as family treasures, and handed down as heirlooms; nay, they were so dealt with in wills and in contracts as if they rose almost to the dignity of real estate. In fact, in those days, the possession of an unusual number of books, with the reputation of using them, constituted a sort of patent of gentility, and seemed to bridge the chasm between the most widely separated classes in society; as when, in 1724, a young mechanic, named Benjamin Franklin, arriving in New York on a sloop from Newport, is invited to the house of the Governor of New York and is honored by him with a long and friendly interview, for no other reason than that the captain of the sloop had told the governor of a lad on his vessel who had with him "a great many books." "The governor received me," says Franklin in his autobiography "with great civility, showed me his library, which was a considerable one, and we had a good deal of conversation relative to books and authors. This was the second governor who had done me the honor to take notice of me, and for a poor boy, like me, it was very pleasing." So I think I am justified in saying that we started on our career as a people with this underlying intellectual quality--a pretty general respect for books, love for them, habit of using them; and this is the impelling moral force which prompts to the several efforts which society has made for providing itself with books. Now, the first stage in the process of library evolution--and I have called it that of private libraries--was the prevailing condition of the American colonies during the whole of the 17th century and the first third of the 18th. This is the picture: Everywhere books, but few, costly, portly, solemn, revered, read over and over again; every respectable family, however poor, having at least a few hereditary treasures in the form of books, as in that of silver and choice furniture; and here and there up and down the colonies, an occasional luminous spot, drawing to itself the wide-eyed wonder of the surrounding inhabitants, the seat of a great private library, belonging to some country gentleman, or clergyman, or publicist, like that of Colonel William Bird, of Westover, or of the Reverend James Blair, of Williamsburg, or of Dr. Cotton Mather, of Boston, or of James Logan, of Philadelphia, or of Cadwallader Colden, of New York.