Besides the Congressional Library, most of the departments have special collections, some of which are very complete and valuable. In addition to those indicated in the table there are libraries at each military post and garrison, at army headquarters, at the National Soldiers' Homes, and on naval and merchant vessels, aggregating two hundred thousand volumes.

Among the most important of all the classes named is the college library. It was also one of the earliest. John Harvard's private collection started the first one simultaneously with the first college. Among the first donations to Virginia education were books and maps for the "college." Yale had a like beginning; and yet in a different sense the modern college library is important. It is both less and more valued; less a general possession, more as a special instrument. It is not now always the first step in the founding of colleges. Forty existing institutions report none.

The total catalogue of three hundred and six libraries is something over three million volumes. Twenty-four institutions, only, report more than twenty-five thousand volumes each; nine have sixty thousand or more.

A good college library is a thing of growth. But four of these twenty-four larger ones were started since 1860: Lehigh (1866), Cornell (1868), University of California (1869), and Johns Hopkins (1876).

This is one of the characteristics of the contemporary library: it is coming to be adapted in kind and conditions to the use to be made of it. It is made a laboratory, a workshop. To the student it becomes the starting-point for research, the source of adjustments and verifications of knowiedge. It is indispensable in the study of history and language, but scarcely less to the student of science who would avoid the needless repetition of observations and established conclusions. Much use of books by associated departments tends to set off the mass of books into special libraries, each with a particular character. So a university will have its general library, society libraries, and professional libraries. It may have, further, its mathematical references or biological or psycho-physical; its historical and philosophical; appliances made constantly available for special studies; not so many catalogued volumes, but trusted authorities. This is true of all the eight or ten largest collections. Not that they are kept in separate buildings or under independent management; indeed, they are not generally so controlled. But, with the greater independence of departments and the larger option among courses and the narrowing of specialties, comes the need for a more systematic use of technical authorities and references and an adapted literature. With such interpretation the library is no longer a place in which to lounge, but an instrument to be used; and so around well-managed libraries have grown up seminaries for special inquiry, and societies, and a contributing literature, and subject alcoves, of great variety and of yet greater service.

Another device for making the library more generally available and useful is the classified subject index. Not a few small libraries of well-chosen books are made doubly serviceable through the use of catalogues so arranged as to place within easy reach their material. Next in importance to the free use of books is the very extensive utilization of magazine, newspaper, and other current literature as sources of information bearing upon studies. Judiciously selected pamphlet collections are of incalculable value. The geographical and educational and economic bureaus of the Johns Hopkins University illustrate this function. Most colleges sustain reading-rooms of substantial literature, also brought by index into the regular current of the library service. Columbia has ten thousand pamphlets, Cornell fifteen thousand, Michigan as many, Yale forty thousand, and Harvard two hundred and seventy thousand.

So important are the management and use of these collections considered in the best colleges, that in more than one institution they have come to be subjects of study. The Columbia College "School of Library Economy" (1883) is a well-organized enterprise that in a more or less complete way is being tried at Johns Hopkins University, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, and elsewhere, both East and West. Rochester University, New York, has given annual lectures on the founding, control, and development of libraries since 1880. At Columbia the faculty of the School of Library Economy consists of nine instructors, including the director and twenty to thirty special non-resident lecturers annually.

The course includes lectures and observations on:

1. Library economy.

2. The scope and usefulness of libraries.

3. The founding and extension of libraries.

4. Buildings.

5. Government and service.

6. Regulations for readers.

7. Administration, catalogue, references, loan, etc.

8. Libraries on special subjects.

9. General libraries.

10. Libraries of special countries or sections.

11. Reading and aids.

12. Literary methods.

13. Bibliography.

14. Catalogues of general collections.

Bibliography.

"The Literary Influence of Academies," by M. Arnold; Learned Societies," by J. Farrar, "North American Review," vol. viii, p. 157; Warren and Clark, "Public Libraries in the United States," 1876; "College Libraries as Aids to Instruction," published by the Bureau of Education; "Free Public Libraries," T. Greenwood, 1886; "Libraries and Schools," by S. S. Green, 1883; “Libraries and Readers,” by W. E. Foster, 1883; "District School Libraries," Horace Mann, Lecture VI; also “Relation of Libraries to General Education," Horace Mann, "Third Report," 1839. Of incalculable value is the "Library Journal," edited by M. Dewey, New York.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION.

THE modern representative Government, like the contemporary Church, is an organized protest against the dominance of unreasoning authority, from whatever source. Nevertheless, the national Government in this country has had a large share in the control and direction of educational thought and institutions.

It has created and repeatedly enlarged school funds, first and directly, by appropriations of land, to the common schools, academies, and universities; and indirectly, through the surplus revenue deposit, and the three per cent of public land sales. It is officially charged with the education of the Indians and Alaskans; provides generously for military and

naval education, both in the two national institutions and in established colleges and universities in the States; furnishes homes and instruction to many hundred soldiers' orphans, and has with rare wisdom contributed millions to the schooling of the impoverished South. The true spirit of republicanism has never opposed any centralization that looked to the greater general good. And to the service of the Government in the particulars named, must be added another chapter treating of the National Bureau of Education, the Smithsonian Institution, and the general scientific work carried on through its departments.

1. The Bureau of Education.

Pinckney, of South Carolina, Madison, of Virginia, Morris, of New York, the wise Jefferson, and a half-dozen other contemporary statesmen, advocated the establishment of a national university, "for the advancement of useful knowledge, and the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades, and manufactures." The idea, in some form, has since come up in almost every administration.

In his message to the two Houses of Congress in 1790, Washington's often-quoted words were full of wisdom and rare foresight. “Knowledge,” he says, “is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately as in ours, from the sense of the community, it is proportionally essential. . . . Whether this will be best promoted," he continued, "by affording aid to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy a place in the deliberations of the Legislature." Six years later he urged immediate attention to the improvement of agriculture as a fundamental concern in this country, and recommended "the creation of a national central agency, charged with collecting and diffusing information, and enabled by premiums and small pecuniary aids to encourage and assist a spirit of discovery and improvement." Twenty