“Give a man this taste and a means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books.
“You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history; with the wisest, the wittiest, with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity.
“You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. It is hardly possible but the character should take a higher and better tone from the constant habit of associating in thought with a class of thinkers, to say the least of it, above the average of humanity.
“It is morally impossible but that the manners should take a tinge of good breeding and civilization from having constantly before one's eyes the way in which the best-bred and the best-informed men have talked and conducted themselves in their intercourse with each other.
“There is a gentle but perfectly irresistible coercion in a habit of reading well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it is really the last thing he dreams of.
“It cannot, in short, be better summed up than in these few words: It civilizes the conduct of men, and suffers them not to remain barbarians.”
Recognizing this love of reading as the keynote to broader culture and a higher standard of morals, one by one, during the last half-century, libraries have been thrown open to the public that were before only accessible to the scholar (and often grudgingly even to him) and new libraries established, till, in every community, a free public library is as much a necessity to-day as its churches or its schools.
Even in the troublous days of the Revolution our forefathers were awaking to this demand, for in 1776 there were 29 “partially public libraries in the colonies”; in 1800 there were 49; in 1876 the number had increased to over 3,000; while to-day we number between 5,000 and 6,000 public libraries, comprising a total of over 20,000,000 volumes.