its severe simplicity; and it offers the serious student a vaster quarry
of books to draw upon, together with wider elbow-room and completer
accommodations. But the Library of Congress is still more liberal, for
it admits all the world without even the formality of applying for a
ticket; and it substitutes for the impressiveness of simplicity the
allurements of splendour. It is impossible to conceive a more brilliant
spectacle than this Rotunda when it is lighted at night by nearly
fifteen-hundred incandescent lamps. Nor is it possible for me to
describe in this place the mechanical marvels of the institution--the
huge underground boiler-house, with its sixteen boilers; the
electrician's room, clean and bright as a new dollar, with its "purring
dynamos" and its immense switch-board; the tunnel through which books
are delivered by electric trolley to the legislators in the Capitol,
within eight minutes of the time they are applied for; and, most
wonderful of all, the endless chain, with its series of baskets, whereby
books are not only brought down to the reading room, but re-delivered,
at the mere touch of a button on whatever "deck" of the nine-storied
"book-stacks" they happen to belong to. So ingenious is this triumph of
mechanism that the baskets seem positively to go through complex
processes of thought and selection. Talking of thought and selection, by
the way, every one connected with the library speaks with enthusiasm of
President McKinley's wise and public-spirited choice of the new chief
librarian. Mr. Herbert Putnam, late of the Boston Public Library, is the
ideal man for the post, and his appointment was made, not only without
suspicion of jobbery, but in the teeth of strong political influence.
Mr. McKinley's action in this matter is considered to be not only right
in itself, but an invaluable precedent.

Let me not be understood, I beg, to make light of the National Capital.
I merely say that to the outward eye it is not yet the city it is