To Colonel James Anderson, Founder of Free Libraries in Western Pennsylvania.  He opened his Library to working boys and upon Saturday afternoons acted as librarian, thus dedicating not only his books but himself to the noble work.  This monument is erected in grateful remembrance by Andrew Carnegie, one of the “working boys” to whom were thus opened the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth may ascend.

[Illustration:  COLONEL JAMES ANDERSON]

This is but a slight tribute and gives only a faint idea of the depth of gratitude which I feel for what he did for me and my companions.  It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community which is willing to support it as a municipal institution.  I am sure that the future of those libraries I have been privileged to found will prove the correctness of this opinion.  For if one boy in each library district, by having access to one of these libraries, is half as much benefited as I was by having access to Colonel Anderson’s four hundred well-worn volumes, I shall consider they have not been established in vain.

“As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”  The treasures of the world which books contain were opened to me at the right moment.  The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives nothing for nothing.  Youths must acquire knowledge themselves.  There is no escape from this.  It gave me great satisfaction to discover, many years later, that my father was one of the five weavers in Dunfermline who gathered together the few books they had and formed the first circulating library in that town.

The history of that library is interesting.  It grew, and was removed no less than seven times from place to place, the first move being made by the founders, who carried the books in their aprons and two coal scuttles from the hand-loom shop to the second resting-place.  That my father was one of the founders of the first library in his native town, and that I have been fortunate enough to be the founder of the last one, is certainly to me one of the most interesting incidents of my life.  I have said often, in public speeches, that I had never heard of a lineage for which I would exchange that of a library-founding weaver.[16] I followed my father in library founding unknowingly—­I am tempted almost to say providentially—­and it has been a source of intense satisfaction to me.  Such a father as mine was a guide to be followed—­one of the sweetest, purest, and kindest natures I have ever known.

[Footnote 16:  “It’s a God’s mercy we are all from honest weavers; let us pity those who haven’t ancestors of whom they can be proud, dukes or duchesses though they be.” (Our Coaching Trip, by Andrew Carnegie.  New York, 1882.)]