290 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



to themselves. Our learned men would grow more learned and more 

 able; our studies deeper and wider; our mind itself exercised and 

 sharpened; the whole culture of the community raised and enriched. 

 This is, indeed, to increase and diffuse knowledge among men. 



If the terms of the trust then authorize this expenditure, why not 

 make it? Not among the principal, nor yet the least of reasons for 

 doing so is that all the while that you are 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 a 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 books; 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 

 account for it unexpectedly, and something to point to if a traveler 

 should taunt you with the collections which he has seen abroad and 

 which gild and recommend the absolutisms of Vienna or St. Petersburg. 



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

 expenditure is that it creates so few jobs and sinecures; so little sal- 

 aried laziness. There is no room for abuses in it. All that you need 

 is a plain, spacious, fireproof 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 application of 

 money that almost excludes the chances of abuses altogether. 



But the decisive argument is, after all, that it is an application the 

 most exactly adapted to the actual literary and scientific wants of the 

 States and the country. 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 hundred and fifty colleges more or less distributed 

 over the country one has a library of perhaps 50,000 volumes; others 

 have good ones though less; others smaller, and smaller, down to 

 scarcely anything. With one voice they unite, teacher and pupil, 

 with every scholar and thinker in proclaiming the want of more. 

 But where are they to come from ? No State is likely to lay a tax to 

 create a college library or a city library. No deathbed gift of the 

 rich can be expected to do it. How then is this one grand want of 

 learning to be relieved? It can be done by you, and by you only. 

 By a providential occurrence it is not only placed within your consti- 



