286 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



is an annual interest of $30,000, of which thus far I have provided for 

 an expenditure of some five thousand only. What will you do with 

 the rest? 



It is easy to waste this money; it is easy to squander it in jobs, sal- 

 aries, quackeries; it is easy, even under the forms of utility, to dis- 

 perse and dissipate it in little rills and drops, imperceptible to all 

 human sense, carrying it off by an insensible and ineffectual evapora- 

 tion. But, sir, I take it that we all earnestly desire — I am sure the 

 Senator from Ohio does so — so to dispense it as to make it tell. I am 

 sure we all desire to see it, instead of being carried off invisibly and 

 wastefully, embody itself in some form, some exponent of civiliza- 

 tion, permanent, palpable, conspicuous, useful. And to this end, it has 

 seemed to me, upon the most mature reflection, that we can not do a 

 safer, surer, more unexceptionable thing with the income, or with a 

 portion of the income — perhaps $20,000 a year for a few years — than 

 to expend it in accumulating a grand and noble public library; one 

 which, for variety, extent, and wealth, shall be, and be confessed to be, 

 equal to any now in the world. 



I say for a few years. Twenty thousand dollars a year for twenty- 

 five years are $500,000; and $500,000 discreetly expended, not by a 

 bibliomaniac, but by a man of sense and reading, thoroughly instructed 

 in bibliography, would go far, very far, toward the purchase of 

 nearly as good a library as Europe can boast. I mean a library of 

 printed books, as distinct from manuscripts. Of course, such a sum 

 would not purchase the number of books which some old libraries are 

 reported to contain. It would not buy the 700,000 of the Royal 

 Library at Paris, the largest in the world; nor the 500,000 or 600,000 

 of that of Munich, the largest in Germany; nor the 300,000, 400,000, 

 or 500,000 of those of Vienna and St. Petersburg, and the Vatican at 

 Rome, and Copenhagen, and the Bodleian at Oxford. But mere num- 

 bers of volumes afford a very imperfect criterion of value. Those old 

 libraries have been so long in collecting; accident and donation, which 

 could not be rejected, have contributed so much to them; a general and 

 indiscriminate system of accumulation gathers up, necessarily, so much 

 trash; there are so many duplicates and quadruplicates, and so many 

 books and editions which become superseded, that mere bulk and mere 

 original cost must not terrify us. Ponderantur ncm nwinerantur. 

 Accordingly, the Library of the University at Gottingen, consisting 

 of perhaps 200,000 volumes, but well chosen, selected for the most 

 part within a century, and to a considerable extent by a single great 

 scholar (Heyne), is perhaps to-day as valuable a collection of printed 

 books as any in the world. Toward the accumulation of such a library, 

 the expenditure of two-thirds of this income for a quarter of a century 

 would make, let me say, a magnificent advance. And, such a step 

 taken, we should never leave the work unfinished; yet, when it should 



