tion, she answered me: "At first I had no wide experience in choosing books for those of my children's age, and I saw no harm in consulting people more expert in it than I — their teacher, for instance. I always tried to draw my children into attachment to the book, accustoming them to look upon it with great interest, and with something of reverence. I would deliberately economize before them on matters of pleasure and buy books for the library — and my plan has succeeded, for my children have come to put the pleasure of the book before any other pleasure."

The advanced world has out-stripped us by long stretches in this arena and has understood the importance of the home library in the rearing of the young, preparing it for them rich in form and in contents, until children now have countless books devoted to them, to cultivate their minds, refine their souls, and train their character. For it has been proven that to content the young person with schoolbooks alone is not the effective way to develop his imagination and widen his experience. The child who sees before him nothing but his schoolbooks — if he is of a disposition inclined to laziness, he wearies of them and throws them far away; and if he is diligent and fond of study, his mentality petrifies, and he comes to understand of culture only one side: the side his dry schoolbooks have given him.

On this occasion I say that we in Lebanon are failing our young. We are wretchedly poor in read-ing books fit for our children, and were it not for our reliance on foreign books on the one hand, and on the Arabic books lately published in some of the sister countries on the other, we should find no book fit for our children to put into their hands. And when I say we are failing,

I do not lay the burden of the failure on any particular quarter; we all share in it. The men of letters are at fault, because they will sacrifice nothing of their mental efforts for this side of things; those in author-ity are at fault, because they do not encourage writing in it; and the rich are at fault, because they do not found a great publishing house, nourishing it with their money and rendering through it a signal ser-vice to the young of their country.

But to remain as we are — the home library among us dominated by foreign books, in which the young reader comes upon no tint of the colors of life in his own country, books which satisfy neither his spiritual need nor his national one

— that, upon my life, is the utmost impotence, in a country that wants to keep its place in the sun.

The home library among us exists, no doubt, and with it we stay our hunger for knowledge and quench our thirst for it; but in the kind of food we eat and offer our children, and in the drink we find palatable for ourselves and for them, we taste the flavor of estrangement from our surroundings and from the air of our own country.

The home library, then, needs what will enrich the culture of the Lebanese as a Lebanese, and what will grace the world of the Lebanese child as a Lebanese child in the first degree.