Page:Address on the opening of the Free Public Library of Ballarat East, on Friday, 1st. January, 1869.djvu/12

 6 of conduct for the year now dawning on us, the performance of a work of this kind, which promises no golden dividends to swell a bank account, deserves to be regarded with the respectful admiration which it commands.

We may feel that your aims are for something higher than the mere accumulation of the "Yellow, glittering, precious gold," that you know the right use of what has been so bounteously bestowed on you. This is indeed an interesting interlude in the exciting turmoil of your week-day existence. It is an interval of graceful repose in the drama of toil-burdened life.

When, therefore, on an occasion such as this, we can abstract our minds from the lodger and the desk and expatiate on things outside the verge of our immediate affairs, we may, by a natural train of reasoning, arrive at the conclusion that the promotion of an object such as this is one of the most useful forms of development which the well-directed intelligence of your community could assume. For there is perhaps no feature of society of the age in which we live more strongly marked than the great desire for knowledge of every kind which pervades all classes. The appetite for knowledge increases as it, is partially gratified, and the gratification of it, instead of leading to satiety, makes it more voracious,—yet more dainty, and ever clamorous for a higher order of food.

Happily for us, the controversy as to the expediency of confining learning to the rich, and the imprudence or impolicy of entrusting it to those in the humbler walks of life, supposed unable to understand or make a rigid use of it, is now closed—to the