Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his libraries.  If Society were fitted up all through with electric connections, men with a genius for discovering continents in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses; and if there were established everywhere a current between every boy and the great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie could make a great beginning with the little mite of his fortune.  If we were to have even one city fitted up in this way, it would be hard to say how much it would mean—­one city with enough people in it who were free to do beautiful things, free to be curious about the others, free to follow clues of greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still, faint little springs and beginnings of things.  It would soon be a memorable city.  A world would watch it, and other cities would grope toward it.  Instead of this we have these big, hollow, unmanned libraries of Mr. Carnegie’s everywhere, with no people practically to go with them, no great hive of happy living men and women in and out all day cross-fertilizing boys and books.

There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a Carnegie Library now.  The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it.  They have come to seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains—­all these impervious, unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge.  I should think it would be a terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see them flocking across the country from your window, all these huge smoke-stacks of books in their weary, sordid cities; and the boys who might be great men, the small Lincolns with nations in their pockets, the little Bells with worlds in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the streets!

CHAPTER V

THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE

Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons.  There always seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along the middle of his life.  The change seemed to be associated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his money.  He reminded one of the patent-medicine advertisements, “Before and After Taking.”

I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire reminds people—­as Mr. Zangwill says he does—­of a patent-medicine advertisement, “Before and After Taking.”

I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together a small collection of pictures of millionaires—­two pictures of each, one before and the other after taking—­and having them mounted in the most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought—­he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist—­really thought, that millionaires “Before and After” were as different as they looked.