It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have inadvertently overlooked.
If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this temperament in others--men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--he would soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men, of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing. Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be--well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings, would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that boy!
There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation in his pocket, a system of railroads--a boy with a national cure for tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody--there is a boy with cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with mountainsful of forests in his heart.