THE LIBRARY 197 



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 educa- 

 tional 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 edu- 

 cation. In the really modern institution the chief building is the 

 library. It is the centre of the institutional activity. . . . That 

 factor of college work, the library, fifty years ago almost unknown, 

 to-day already the centre 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 toward this 

 preparation of the pupil for the independent study of the book by 

 himself. It points toward acquiring the ability of self-education 

 by means of the library.' 



" I might quote similar utterances from many other eminent edu- 

 cators as to the value - - the necessity - - of the library in early 

 education; but I can think of no stronger summing-up of the subject, 

 nor from higher authority, than this statement from President Eliot : 

 ' From the total training during childhood there should result in 

 the child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should 

 direct and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling 

 which results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or 

 eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main end 

 of elementary education; and that schooling which does not result 

 in implanting this permanent taste has failed. . . . The uplifting of 

 the democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the 

 taste for good reading.' 



: To persons who have given little thought to educational questions 

 these utterances will have the weight that attaches to the highest 

 authority; but we need no university president nor national com- 

 missioner to tell us these facts. We have learned them from our 

 own experience; and enlightened as we now are, it seems to us 

 strange that question could ever have been raised as to the essential 

 character of the library in elementary education. Yet there are 

 some of us, I am sure, who can recall painful consequences from 

 putting into practice an educational theory not generally accepted 

 by the pedagogues of our childhood days. 



' We know that higher education is impossible without a library, 

 for the library is the storehouse of the world's knowledge, the record 



