Many varieties of _sham_ equality result from outside pressure. In Venetian gondolas all awnings are required to be black that no one may outshine his neighbor. Under the first republic the French proscribed all titles but citizen, and citizeness, which they gave to everybody. Communists would make all men's shares in property equal. Endeavors of this sort not only fail, but prove suicidal like the impetuous Irishman, insisting that one man is as good as another, and _a great dey better too_. The influence of Free Libraries, however is toward genuine and not merely visible equality. Thanks to them the most expensive luxury of the rich becomes the daily food of the poor, and the tree of knowledge no more bears forbidden fruit. A volume which I can draw out of a library at will is worth as much to me as if I owned it. In fact, though my private library is not small, the books I read are more often borrowed than my own.
If I take out books from a library, I am doubly spurred to to make their contents my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what book we borrow.
FRANKLIN tells us that "he often sat up reading, the greater part of the night, when a book borrowed (he means _stolen_) from booksellers in the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found missing." In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become alike _inside_, in real communion with great authors, in information, taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,--accomplishments which cannot be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his fellows. Men will still differ by God, not by man. What then is the Free Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?
When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing. But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and say; "These are our jewels." Not tombs, but living shrines that on the living still work miracles,--the shrines where all the relics of the saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the dumb speak--the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is