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letters, our arts, our literature, are met constantly by the insolent assumption, not that these drawbacks exist, but that they are not worth removing.
How magnificent, for instance, is the work constantly done among us, by private and public munificence, in the support of our libraries and schools.
Carlyle, in one of his early journals, deplores that while every village around him has its place to lock up criminals, not one has a public library.
In the State of Massachusetts this condition of things is coming to be reversed, since many villages have no jail, and free libraries will soon be universal.
The writer is at this moment one of the trustees of three admirable donations just given by a young man not thirty-five to the city of his birth,—a city hall, a public library, and a manual training school.
He is not a man of large fortune, as fortunes go, and his personal expenditures are on a very modest scale; he keeps neither yachts nor racehorses; his name never appears in the lists of fashionables, summer or winter; but he simply does his duty to American civilization in this way. There are multitudes of others, all over
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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