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The Courier-Review.
he is gone and unable to attend to it, that these things which Edison has produced and which he has set other people to producing, has more to do with the cultivation of power than the old method. The fact is, in the old education, we are simply trained to think: they did not give us anything to think about; but in the new they give us a great many things to think about, and are greatly in danger of forgetting to give us anything to think about them with.
In connection with the thought that I have been pursuing in regard to education, look at the use that is made of libraries. The old system was simply to get a book and read it. If a man wanted to know anything in history, he would go to the best authority who had written on the subject and swallow him bodily. The boy who had read Bancroft, knew it all, swallowed him wholesale, and no doubt was a very learned man, but did not know exactly how he became so. Now the boy who is studying history wants something more than conclusions. He wants to know how to reach these facts from the data upon which they rest. He wants to know how to investigate any subject that he is ever called upon to investigate. Given a fact in regard to the history of Kansas, the life of Kansas, the boy wants to know how to go to the earliest records of the town, to the earliest records of Congress, get the facts all together, compare, calculate, judge and draw his own conclusions at the end. That is the kind of training that we want today in the department of history. When I was a student, a course of lectures was given on the middle ages. I thought at the time that they were very fine, but the professor did not seem to think very much of them. And I see now he was right. They were a mass of facts which he gave us, and we swallowed them whole. When a student goes into the library now to study, he does not know what book he wants in particular; he wants them all, one suggests another. He compares one with another, and gets the best there is to be had on the subject from each. In the present we need to be where we can get good books. With all this research into the .best books, when a student gets through
with his training, he is worth five times as much as the historical student of the olden time was, who simply listened to lectures upon history. The library should be opened all day, and every day, and opened in the evening, and later than dewy eve; it should be opened until bed-time, opened to every student with the utmost freedom. Suppose you do lose a few books, lose them. Suppose you do get a dishonest student once in a while who pockets a book, in the interests of those who are trying to make the most of themselves, let him pocket it. Let them go down through the ages in the pockets of those fellows an everlasting conscience.
This is an age of books. Do you know in what demand they are? With so many thousands coming out, a man who prides himself on keeping up is in constant danger of losing his self-respect. I have found great comfort myself in the words of that celebrated writer Hobbs who says "If I had read as many books as other people I might know as little as they." I have never cared to read those books that come out and become the fad of the hour, and after a brief period their light vanishes and you hear of them no more. It is better to stick to those lines of thought and reading that have commended themselves from the first. We cannot read all these books. We must have most of them, the best of them in the library. We must have rich materials. This leads me to a point that comes home to a Kansas audience, the point that a library of twenty or thirty thousand volumes is no library at all for the university of a state. Harvard has over 420, 000; Yale has 200,000; Chicago University purchased 250,000 at once, a German library. Many of the universities of the country have libraries of 50,000, 70,000 and 90,000 volumes. There are in this library 30,000 volumes, but are minds such as are to be found in Minnesota and Kansas to be satisfied with that number? If you will pardon a stranger, one who has shown his interest in Kansas, as I pointed out in the address, and is willing to show it again in the same way if any of you are to be killed. A benefactor outside of the state has built this building, and it remains for the peo-