The Helping Nation

Before there was a United States, there was the habit that would make one possible. In 1731 a young printer in Philadelphia persuaded fifty friends to pool their money and buy books none of them could afford alone, creating the Library Company. Five years later Benjamin Franklin organized the Union Fire Company, thirty men with leather buckets who agreed to run toward one another’s houses. Neither was a government program. Both worked. The pattern they set—citizens identifying a public need and simply fulfilling it, without waiting for permission or an appropriation—has run through 250 years of American life and now supports an enterprise larger than most national economies.