Excerpt from A Plea for a National Library The pe0pie of Switzerland, in their Stadt Bibliothesk at Berna, possess an equally efficient and broadly accessible national library of some two hundred thousand volumes, housed in a new building carefully planned to meet all the needs of such an institution. The books in this library are absolutely free to residents of every part of Switzerland. A student in the most remote hamlet may send a request to the capital for any work he needs, and if it is available, he gets it by mail, without any unnecessary formalities or other expenses than the actual cost of transportation. He may borrow as many as six volumes at a time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.