A few additional points remain to be noted. It is an entirely pertinent question whether every public library in England and America improves its high privilege, uses to the full the peculiar opportunities open to it, places itself in close communication with the public school system, with the university extension movement, and with the influences continually at work in industrial and artistic development. And we need not hesitate to answer in the negative. Yet the significant fact is, that everywhere the tendency is in this direction with a stronger and stronger momentum. The advance made in this country, within the last decade even, in this direction, is among the most striking phenomena of the time; and no less striking is the almost overwhelming percentage of the body of librarians in this country whose entrance upon the work from a deep-seated love for it, rather than as furnishing a means of livelihood, supplies one of the strongest guarantees against the invasion of the perfunctory spirit in the future. Again, it is equally pertinent to ask whether, granted that the benefits of such an institution as the public library are unquestioned, dependence may not be placed on funds entirely unconnected with those of the public, for its support. It would ill become the citizen of a country where private munificence has accomplished so much in channels of public spirit, to overlook these noble memorials of enlightened private action. Yet it remains true, nevertheless, that were dependence to be placed on these alone, a map of the country on which public libraries should be dotted down would show as partial and inadequate a supply furnished to the community, as the very instructive "annual rainfall map" published by the government shows in the matter of rain. What we are accustomed, in the eastern portion of this country, to consider the rain--in its universal beneficent service and in its indispensableness--that also is to be associated with the "reservoirs" comprised in these public collections of books. For, after all, valuable as are the books themselves, even in their material aspect, as pieces of handiwork, still more in the specific items of information and admonition contained in them, yet in the deeper view these are but symbols of their real significance and service. To place one's self in communication with them as contained in these libraries, is to bring ourselves in contact with the stored-up thought of the world thus far. We have just adverted to the fundamental bearing which this has upon the deeper or spiritual side of man's life. But the two-sided character of these collections of books follows us even here, for their indispensableness in the material point of view is almost as striking, and this, not only whether we consider the statesman planning measures of public weal, while neglecting to inform himself of the recorded conditions which necessarily must determine such measures; or whether it be the inventor spending long years of his too brief life in perfecting a machine which his consultation of the recorded patent would have shown him some one else had anticipated him in thinking out; or whether it be the day laborer submitting without an effort to violations of his rights, which a single glance at the recorded statutes would have shown him he had a remedy for.