I

not everything. I suspect that many people would say, on hearing that a free public library has been formed, "Oh, it will furnish nothing but a sort of gratuitous circulating library of all the sensational novels that come out." Well, a man had much better read a sensational novel than read nothing; but I do not believe that is the experience of free public libraries. I do not believe they have simply furnished fiction to those for whom they cater. believe the experience is that a fair proportion of thoughtful books are taken and digested, and preeminently I believe by the artisan class. But even then there is a difficulty. You take your man or woman or child, thirsting for knowledge, to those shelves. He longs to read something which will help him, and he does not know what he is to read, or how he is to get at the right book to read. Now, of course, many great geniuses have been formed or guided, as they have told us, by being left in a library quite free, and allowed to read whatever their mind guided them to, but I do not believe that to be a wholesome case at all. The number of books has increased so enormously, the titles, if I may say so, are sometimes so misleading, that a student who is thrown into a library under unrestricted conditions is apt to be very much like that confectioner's apprentice--I do not know whether he really exists or whether he is legendary

-who, on his first employment in a confectioner's shop, is always allowed to eat as much as he chooses, in the sure confidence of his master that he will eat so much, and procure for himself so disagreeable an illness, that he will never wish to partake again. Well, I think that is the danger of the student who wanders into these libraries without any guide whatever to help him.

That brings me to my last point. I think every free public library requires a taster in the shape of a librarian-that is to say, a man who not only knows the outsides and the titles of books, but a man who knows the insides. They require a taster to guide the student as to what he wants. I do not know whether you have a taster in your librarian to-day, because I have only just made his acquaintance, but I do not doubt that you have. But it is a real and inestimable faculty. I believe that a tea-taster-a man who is endowed with the peculiar faculty of tasting tea and discriminating between the coarser and the finer kinds of tea—has a fortune in his palate; I believe that a man who can discriminate between the various kinds of silk by touch has a fortune in his fingers; but I am sure that neither of these is so valuable to the intellectual life of the nation as the taster who will guide the student to the books the student wants. Well, I will not detain you any longer to-day. I

hope that in these somewhat desultory remarks I have given the audience who have done me the honour to come here to-day some hope and some foundation for hope in the future of this library. It is itself a proof of the public spirit which has been awakened of late years in the inhabitants of London, and I trust with all my heart that it may not be the last of the proofs of that public spirit, nor especially of the proofs of the public spirit of that great benefactor [Mr. Passmore Edwards] to whom it is my pleasure to move a vote of thanks to-day.

TECHNICAL EDUCATION

On Opening a Technical Institute at Epsom
July 24, 1896

IT gives me great pleasure to come here to-day and open this Institute. It has given me pleasure in more senses than one. In the first place, I have become acquainted internally with the very graceful building which has now for some time adorned Epsom, and which does so much credit to the architect, Mr. Hatchard Smith. And in the next place, I am not quite sure that we in Epsom meet quite often enough, so that I welcome an opportunity like this of cordial co-operation for an object of public interest. Epsom suffers, of course, through being overshadowed and engulfed to some extent in the great metropolis. But we do not wish to sink into being a mere item in the metropolitan police area; and though we do not endeavour to compete with our larger neighbour in the sense in which a Scotch minister of the Cumbraes used to pray for the Isles of Cumbrae and the adjacent isles of Great Britain and Ireland, yet at the same time we desire to

remain a community and not an item. This is not, strictly speaking, the opening day of our Institute -except in the most agreeable sense of the term. The building, as I understand, has long been open for use, but we determined that we would not open it formally until we were free of debt.

Now, one of the most startling features of the amazing age in which we live is the different code of morality which obtains with regard to public enterprise and private individuals. Private individuals, if they fall into debt, are no longer put into prison, except they are fraudulent debtors, but they are visited to some extent with the moral censure of the community, though probably nobody can say that they have passed through their lives without being in that condition of wrath. But with regard to public enterprise, the facts are very different. I suppose there are none of us who do not pass a day without receiving some agonising appeal from some struggling promoter of a good cause, who has laid out £1000 in a building with only £100 to meet it with. And the result is that, in the case which I am instancing, a debt of £900, which he would have been reprimanded for incurring as an individual, is regarded as meritorious when incurred as the representative of a "cause." I am not sure that even the ecclesiastical enterprises are free from a reproach of that nature.