It is not often that a good deed is remembered two hundred years afterward. Those men who have formed a society of bibliophiles under the name of the John Barnard Associates have done an excellent and very fitting thing; for it was the Reverend Mr. Barnard, who, in the middle of the last century, replaced the old library which had been lost by fire with a new one of his own. The colleges in those days was not the prosperous organization it is now, and such a gift meant as much then as would the gift of a new library today, should Widener burn to the ground.
The loyalty of such graduates is a better fire insurance than any a college could possibly buy, and all such benefactors, past and present, deserve a better memorial than the presence of an occasional dusty book on the more esoteric shelves of Widener; the new association, besides bringing mutual pleasure to the members, is thus making a graceful, if tardy, acknowledgment of Harvard's debt to John Barnard.
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