If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this temperament in others—­men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them—­and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them—­he would soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men, of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing.  Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be—­well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie’s, those great proud buildings, would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that boy!

There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation in his pocket, a system of railroads—­a boy with a national cure for tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody—­there is a boy with cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with mountainsful of forests in his heart.

This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them—­with all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting about for himself?  He could only be hunted out by people all wrought through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy—­by some special kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys.  If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about thickly, among the books in his libraries—­those huge anatomies and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great literary steel-works—­men would soon begin to be discovered, to be created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now....