TWENTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS, 1843-45. 317 



sharpened ; the whole culture of the community raised and 

 enriched. This is, indeed, to increase and diffuse knowl- 

 edge among men. 



If the terms of the trust, then, authorize this expenditure, 

 why not make it ? ISTot among the principal, nor yet the 

 least of reasons for doing so, is, that all the while that you 

 iire laying out your money, and when you have laid it out, 

 you have the money's worth, the value received, the property 

 purchased, on hand, to show for itself and to speak for itself. 

 Suppose the professors provided for in the bill should gather 

 ii little circle of pupils, each of whom should carry off with 

 him some small quotient of navigation or horticulture, or 

 rural economy, and the fund should thus glide away and 

 evaporate in such insensible, inappreciable appropriations, 

 how little there would be to testify of it ! Whereas here, 

 all the while, are the boolvs ; here is the value ; here is the 

 visible property ; here is the oil, and here is the light. 

 There is something to point to, if you should be asked to 

 xiccount for it unexpectedly, and something to point to, if a 

 traveller should taunt you with the collections which he has 

 seen abroad, and which gild and recommend the absolutisms 

 of Vienna or St. Petersburgh. 



Another reason, not of the strongest to be sure, for this 

 mode of expenditure is, that it creates so few jobs and sine- 

 cures ; so little salaried laziness. There is no room for 

 abuses in it. All that you need is a plain, spacious, fire- 

 proof building ; a librarian and assistants ; an agent to buy 

 your books, and a fire to sit by. For all the rest, he who 

 wants to read goes and ministers to himself. It is an appli- 

 cation of money that almost excludes the chances of abuses 

 altogether. 



But the decisive argument is, after all, that it is an applica- 

 tion the most exactly adapted to the actual literary and scien- 

 tific wants of the States and the countr3^ I have said that 

 another college is not needed here, because there are enough 

 now ; and another might do harm as much as good. But 

 that which is wanted for every college, for the whole 

 country, for every studious person, is a well-chosen library, 

 somewhere among us, of three or four hundred thousand 

 books. Where is such a one to be collected ? How is it 

 to be done ? Who is to do it ? Of the liundred and fifty 

 colleges, more or less, distributed over the country, one has 

 a library of perhaps fifty thousand volumes ; others have 

 good ones, thougli less ; others smaller, and smaller, down 

 to scarcely anything. With one voice they unite, teacher 

 iind pupil, with every scholar and thinker, in proclaiming 



