The Alaska citizen., 1916-11-20
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THE MAGIC POWER or eooNo.

In the time of our ancestors, get. tne at books was a serious matter indeed. In our day, getting away from books is almost as serious.
 Then books were few and hard ,a obtain: today they are so number less and may be had at so small cost. that people even in the hum bIe walks of life may command them.
 The question is no longer How can I get books to read2" but rather, What books shall I select to read. Thomas Carlyle. with charac- teristic originality, divided books into two classes. The Sheep and the Goats" claiming that to be an intel ngant judge between the sheep and the goats was the secret of the kind of reading matter that eduoates men and women. When We come to know even few books well. We learn they possess the magic power to lib crate us from the circumscription of either time or personal environment
 There are really three kinds of bondage into which all men and women are in some degree born
 There is the bondage of place, which applies to those who do not possess wealth or independent means. and cannot move about the world at zslil but no matter how closely ones duties may confine one to some particular locality, nor how engrossing our work may be. there is always an open door into the unknown world through the guidance of books.
 There is also the bondage of time. We are approaching the end of the second decade of the twentieth cen tury, a century which will undoubt- edly be memorable for its tremen- dous energy in every department of life, and its achievement of a broader freedom. not only for the American people, but for all people who in habit the globe Put what can it profit us how wonderful and great the time in which We live may be. if We cannot enter into the true spirit of ito And this We cannot do unless We know something of the times that have gone before. Every age is largely the product of the age that precedes it No one can understand the restless and tireless forces at work about us in the tWen- tieth century, who does not in some measure understand the nineteenth century, and the nineteenth century is incomprehensible without some knowledge of the sixteenth. No one knows and appreciates his own time who is unfamiliar with the history of other times.
 There is also another bondage from which no human being ever entirely escapes, and that is the limitation of our own personal expert ence but from all of these, whether of time, of place or of personal ex- perience, liberation, in great mea- sure. is sure and free through the wonderful and refining agency of good books.
 In history of every description, es- pecially in "Plutarchs Lives we may meet on terms of delightful intima- cy the stalwart spirits of ancient days and have revealed to us the very thoughts and motives that ac- tuated them as they played their part in the strange tragedy of human life. There we behold immortal Greek pitted against immortal Ro- man in comparative story and we in this so-called more enlightened age may weigh them in the scales of modern civilization and judge De- tween them.
 If history pals upon us and we are lured by the fascination of fife tion, then the works of Walter Scott, if read in proper order, will pre- sent a perfect picture of the times from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Chas, Kingsley's "Hypatia' draws the curtain from life in the fifth century in old Egypt, and per mits us to meet and mingle with Greek culture and Oriental supersti- tion and enthusiasm. There he out lines the terrific conflict that ragged throughout the greater part of the Roman Empire between Neopolitanism as exemplified by the beautiful pagan girl Hypatia, and budding. expanding