HOW A LIBRARY HELPED THE BOYS
As the children have grown up since our library was established, it is wonderful how their demands for books have widened. A boy in his casual reading finds some particular branch of study, in science, mechanics, art or politics, which arouses a sleeping instinct. Straightway he forsakes his stories and his plays and goes to the library to satisfy his new desires. Year by year the demand upon the library has broadened and books have been added treating of electricity, the X-ray, wireless telegraphy, mending bicycles, telephones, bee-keeping, care of pet animals, political, social and economic questions, and still the books do not meet all demands. New subjects are called for and new books must be bought.
BEAVER DAM ARGUS.
Side by side in the wilderness, our forefathers planted the church and the school; and on these two supports the nation has stood firm and grown great. But a tripod is necessary for stable equilibrium. As the country has grown, its industrial, economic and political problems have grown more numerous and more complex, and the nation required a broader base of intelligence and morality for its security and perpetuity. The third support for a wider and higher national life has been found in the public library, which co-operating with the school, doubles the value of the education the child receives in school and further incites and furnishes him with facilities for doing so. It also enables the adult to make up for the opportunities he neglected or, more often, did not have in early life. It does this, too, at an expense to the community of not more than one tenth of the cost per capita of school education.
F. M. CRUNDEN.