Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at the windows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks of learning on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary people that dribble in from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down listless in them—­in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you never thought that somewhere all about them, somewhere in this same library, there must be some white, silent, sunny country of the future, full of children and of singing, full of something very different from these iron walls of wisdom?  And have you never thought what it would mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties for people among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the books in it, became, as it were, wired throughout with live, splendid, delighted men and women, to make connections, to establish the current between the people and the books, to discover the people one by one and follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives, and take out the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers and poets, and the Kossuths, Caesars, the Florence Nightingales...?

It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work can be done.  It must be delicate and wonderful workmanship, like the magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope—­sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon the earth:  but it would pay.

The same people too, specialists in detecting and developing inventors, could be supplied also to all other possible callings.  They would constitute a universal profession, penetrating all the others.  They would go hunting among foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts.  They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors.  They would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets.

We do not a little for the Submerged Tenth and the sons of the poor, and we have schools or missions for the sons of the rich, but one of the things we need next to-day is that something should be done for the sons of the great neglected respectable classes.  Far more important than one more library—­say in Denver, for instance would be a Denver Bureau of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced, spirited men, of expert humanists, to study difficulties, and devise methods and missions for putting all society in Denver through filters or placers, and finding out the rich human ore, finding out where everybody really belonged, and what all the clever misplaced people were really for.  Of course it would take money to do all this, and flocks of free people who are doing the work they love.  But it is not book-racks, nor paper, nor ink, nor stone steps, nor white pillars—­it is free men and free women America and England are asking of their Andrew Carnegies to-day.