Chapter XV

, Vol. II of the "Life," and get a further idea of Ticknor's zeal in promoting the Boston library and his interest in making it as popular as possible, in distinction to the idea of a library solely for scholars, upheld by John Jacob Astor, in his New York gift of three years previous, which Everett rather favored.

George Ticknor was born in Boston, Aug. 1, 1791 and graduated at Dartmouth in 1807. He was admitted to the bar in 1813 but devoted his life chiefly to teaching and to literature, serving as professor in Harvard in 1819-35. He died in Boston, Jan. 26, 1871. A sketch of Everett appears on page 127 of this volume.

The endowment of a great library in New York, given by Mr. John Jacob Astor, at his death, in 1848, was much talked about; and men of forecast began to say openly that, unless something of a like character were done in Boston, the scientific and literary culture of this part of the country would follow trade and capital to the metropolis, which was thus taking the lead. Still, nothing effectual was done. Among the persons with whom Mr. Ticknor had, of late years, most frequently talked of the matter, Dr. Channing was dead, Mr. Abbott Lawrence had become Minister to England, and Mr. Jonathan Phillips was growing too infirm to take part in public affairs. The subject, however, kept its hold on Mr. Ticknor's mind.

His idea was that which he felt lay at the foundation of all our public institutions, namely, that in order to form and maintain our character as a great nation, the mass of the people must be intelligent enough to manage their own government with wisdom; and he came, though not at once, to the conclusion that a very free use of books, furnished by an institution supported at the expense of the community, would be one of the effective means for obtaining this result of general culture.

He had reached this conclusion before he saw any probability of its being practically carried out, as is proved by the following letter, which he wrote to Mr. Everett, in the summer of 1851. A few months before this date Mr. Everett had presented to the city--after offering it in vain more than once--a collection of about a thousand volumes of Public Documents, and books of similar character, accompanied by a letter, urging the establishment of a public library.

To HON. EDWARD EVERETT.

Bellows Falls, Vermont, July 14, 1851.

MY DEAR EVERETT,--I have seen with much gratification from time to time, within the last year, and particularly in your last letter on the subject, that you interest yourself in the establishment of a public library in Boston;--I mean a library open to all the citizens, and from which all, under proper restrictions, can take out books. Such, at least, I understand to be your plan; and I have thought, more than once, that I would talk with you about it, but accident has prevented it. However, perhaps a letter is as good on all accounts, and better as a distinct memorandum of what I mean.

It has seemed to me, for many years, that such a free public library, if adapted to the wants of our people, would be the crowning glory of our public schools. But I think it important that it should be adapted to our peculiar character; that is, that it should come in at the end of our system of free instruction, and be fitted to continue and increase the effects of that system by the self-culture that results from reading.

The great obstacle to this with us is not--as it is in Prussia and elsewhere--a low condition of the mass of the people, condemning them, as soon as they escape from school, and often before it, to such severe labor, in order to procure the coarsest means of physical subsistence, that they have no leisure for intellectual culture, and soon lose all taste for it. Our difficulty is, to furnish means specially fitted to encourage a love for reading, to create an appetite for it, which the schools often fail to do, and then to adapt these means to its gratification. That an appetite for reading can be very widely excited is plain, from what the cheap publications of the last twenty years have accomplished, gradually raising the taste from such poor trash as the novels with which they began, up to the excellent and valuable works of all sorts which now flood the country, and are read by the middling classes everywhere, and in New England, I think, even by a majority of the people.[2]

Now what seems to me to be wanted in Boston is, an apparatus that shall carry this taste for reading as deep as possible into society, assuming, what I believe to be true, that it can be carried deeper in our society than in any other in the world, because we are better fitted for it. To do this I would establish a library which, in its _main_ department and purpose, should differ from all free libraries yet attempted; I mean one in which any popular books, tending to moral and intellectual improvement, should be furnished in such numbers of copies that many persons, if they desired it, could be reading the same work at the same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the pleasant literature of the day, should be made accessible to the whole people at the only time when they care for it, _i.e._ when it is fresh and new. I would, therefore, continue to buy additional copies of any book of this class, almost as long as they should continue to be asked for, and thus, by following the popular taste,--unless it should demand something injurious,--create a real appetite for healthy general reading. This appetite, once formed, will take care of itself. It will, in the great majority of cases, demand better and better books; and can, I believe, by a little judicious help, rather than by any direct control or restraint, be carried much higher than is generally thought possible.

[2] Mr. Ticknor was much struck by the publication of a cheap edition of Johns' Translation of Froissart, by the Harpers, of which he found a copy in a small inn of a retired village of southern New York, in 1844; and he always watched the signs of popular taste, both in publishers' lists and in the bookshelves of the houses which he entered, in his summer journeys, or in his errands of business and charity in the winter.

After some details, of no present consequence, developing this idea, the letter goes on:--

Nor would I, on this plan, neglect the establishment of a department for consultation, and for all the common purposes of public libraries, some of whose books, like encyclopaedias and dictionaries, should never be lent out, while others could be permitted to circulate; all on the shelves being accessible for reference as many hours in the day as possible, and always in the evening. This part of the library, I should hope, would be much increased by donations from public-spirited individuals, and individuals interested in the progress of knowledge, while, I think, the public treasury should provide for the more popular department.

Intimations of the want of such public facilities for reading are, I think, beginning to be given. In London I notice advertisements of some of the larger circulating libraries, that they purchase one and two hundred copies of all new and popular works; and in Boston, I am told, some of our own circulating libraries will purchase almost any new book, if the person asking for it will agree to pay double the usual fee for reading it; while in all, I think, several, and sometimes many copies of new and popular works are kept on hand for a time, and then sold, as the demand for them dies away.

Omitting other details, now of no importance, the letter ends as follows:--

Several years ago I proposed to Mr. Abbott Lawrence to move in favor of such a library in Boston; and, since that time, I have occasionally suggested it to other persons. In every case the idea has been well received; and the more I have thought of it and talked about it, the more I have been persuaded, that it is a plan easy to be reduced to practice, and one that would be followed by valuable results.

I wish, therefore, that you would consider it, and see what objections there are to it. I have no purpose to do anything more about it myself than to write you this letter, and continue to speak of it, as I have done heretofore, to persons who, like yourself, are interested in such matters. But I should be well pleased to know how it strikes you.

To this letter Mr. Everett replied as follows:--

CAMBRIDGE, July 26, 1851.

MY DEAR TICKNOR,--I duly received your letter of the 14th from Bellows Falls, and read it with great interest.

The extensive circulation of new and popular works is a feature of a public library which I have not hitherto much contemplated. It deserves to be well weighed, and I shall be happy hereafter to confer with you on the subject. I cannot deny that my views have, since my younger days, undergone some change as to the practicability of freely loaning books at home from large public libraries. Those who have been connected with the administration of such libraries are apt to get discouraged, by the loss and damage resulting from the loan of books. My present impressions are in favor of making the amplest provision in the library for the use of books there.

Your plan, however, is intended to apply only to a particular class of books, and does not contemplate the unrestrained circulation of those of which the loss could not be easily replaced.

That Boston must have a great public library, or yield to New York in letters as well as in commerce, will, I think, be made quite apparent in a few years. But on this and other similar subjects I hope to have many opportunities of conferring with you next winter.

The difference of opinion, here made evident, as to the possibility or safety of allowing books to circulate freely, was not removed by many subsequent conversations, nor were the hopes of either of the gentlemen, with regard to the establishment of a great library, raised even when, in the early part of 1852, the mayor, Mr. Seaver, recommended that steps be taken for such an object, and the Common Council, presided over by Mr. James Lawrence, proposed that a board of trustees for such an institution should be appointed. When, therefore, both Mr. Everett and Mr. Ticknor--the latter greatly to his surprise--were invited to become members of this board, they conferred together anew on the project; and, although the mayor, on hearing Mr. Ticknor's views, was much pleased with them, and urged him to take the place, yet he at one time determined to decline the office, certainly unless the library were to be open for the free circulation of most of its books, and unless it were to be dedicated, in the first instance, rather to satisfying the wants of the less favored classes of the community, than--like all public libraries then in existence--to satisfying the wants of scholars, men of science, and cultivated men generally.

THE FUNCTION OF A TOWN LIBRARY

Nearly a quarter-century elapsed after Ticknor's letter, just quoted, before the publication in book form of Josiah P. Quincy's "Protection of Majorities and Other Essays" (Boston, 1875), of which collection his paper on the function of a town library forms a part. As stated in his introduction, it appeared originally in _Old and New_, a magazine already extinct when that introduction was penned.

While asserting as strongly as Mr. Ticknor his belief in making a library "popular," the writer denies that his belief justifies the inclusion of fiction. His position seems to be that, praiseworthy as much of it is, fiction should not be supplied to the public from the public funds. The present attitude, that this is a matter to be settled by the public itself, is repudiated in set terms and with somewhat picturesque illustrations, by Mr. Quincy. His stalwart advocacy of the library as a supplement to the school is what justifies the inclusion of his paper in this collection. Those who desire to follow Mr. Quincy a little farther may read the next paper in the above-named collection entitled "The Abuse of Reading."

Josiah Phillips Quincy was born in Boston, Nov. 28, 1829 and graduated at Harvard in 1850, the son of the statesman Josiah Quincy who was also president of Harvard. He was admitted to the bar in 1854, but afterward engaged in business and in farming, also writing freely on civic and economic subjects.

This is a one-sided paper. Something might be said on the other side; but, as that is the popular side, it is likely to receive full justice. In behalf of an unconverted minority, who should be represented through the press, if nowhere else, I desire to register a dissent from the prevailing opinion concerning the function of libraries sustained by the taxation of towns and small municipalities. The importance of stimulating thought upon subjects bearing ever so remotely upon our fiscal requirements, I conceive to be far greater than may superficially appear. For when the mass of our people clearly comprehend what government should not be called upon to do for them, they will insist upon its performing duties which are manifestly within its sphere of action. Laboring men and women are to-day suffering from the adulteration of their food and drink, and from a system of taxation which oppresses them with weighty and unjust burdens. Their deliverance can only come by dismissing legislators who are disciples of what may be called the Todgers school of economy; that remarkable matron, as Dickens tells us, caring little for the solid sustenance of her boarders, provided "the gravy" was abundant and satisfactory.

Upon what principle can the citizen, who thinks before he casts his ballot, justify himself in voting increased taxes upon his neighbors for the purpose of establishing a library? He must assume the necessity of public schools, and then argue that he may vote for a library that will supplement the elementary instruction which the town provides. And the justification is ample. If our schools are so conducted as to awaken a taste for knowledge and give a correct method in English reading, the town library may represent the university brought to every man's door. But suppose a large portion of the funds taken from tax-payers is devoted to circulating ephemeral works of mere amusement. Is it not as monstrous for me to vote to tax my neighbor to furnish the boys and girls with "A Terrible Tribulation," or "Lady So-and-So's Struggle," as it would be for the purpose of providing them with free tickets to witness "Article 47" or "The Black Crook"? These romances and dramas (to represent them in the most favorable point of view) are evanescent productions, designed to meet the market demand for the intense and spasmodic. Their claims to patronage from the public purse are precisely similar.

So far, the citizen has a right to object as a tax-payer. But, if he were truly solicitous for the welfare of the community about him, the protest might be far deeper. For the weak spot in our school system lies just here: while claiming immense credit for giving most of our children the ability to read, we show the profoundest indifference about what they read. But this accomplishment of reading is a very doubtful good if it goes no farther than to give a boy the satisfaction of perusing "The Police Gazette," or introduces a girl to the immoralities of Mr. Griffith Gaunt, and the adventures of a hundred other heroes of characters even more questionable. By teaching our children to read, and then setting them adrift in a sea of feverish literature which vitiates the taste and enervates the character, we show an indifference about as sensible as that of the old lady who thought it could not matter whether her son had gone to the bosom of Abraham or Beelzebub, seeing that they were both Scripture names.

It is not difficult to conceive of communities, existing in Greenland or elsewhere, which might legitimately tax the citizen to furnish his neighbors with their novel-reading. But it can scarcely be disputed that an increased facility for obtaining works of fiction is not the pressing need of our country in this present year of grace. Dr. Isaac Ray, perhaps our highest authority on morbid mental phenomena, concludes his study on the effects of the prevalent romantic literature in these words: "The specific doctrine I would inculcate is, that the excessive indulgence in novel-reading, which is a characteristic of our times, is chargeable with many of the mental irregularities that prevail among us in a degree unknown at any former period." The late Dr. Forbes Winslow, a physician of similar note in England, used still stronger language in describing how fearfully and fatally suggestive to the minds of the young are those artistically developed records of sin which form the staple of the popular novel. In these days of disordered nerve centres, and commissions to inquire into every thing, we neglect much valuable information which lies upon the surface. It is well to bear in mind that our eminent bibliographer, Mr. Spofford, has informed us that "masses of novels and other ephemeral publications overload most of our popular libraries"; and that our wisest physicians have agreed as to the influence they exert.

Of course these views will be met by a brusque statement that town libraries must supply such books as people want, and that they demand the current novels in unlimited quantities. But I repudiate the dismal fallacy upon which such an argument is based. Plum-cake and champagne would doubtless be demanded at a Sunday-school picnic, were these delicacies placed upon the table; but, if the committee did not think it necessary to supply them from the parish funds, is it certain that a fair amount of cold beef and hasty-pudding would not be consumed in their stead? And if a heartless man-government declined to furnish Maggie and Mollie with "The Pirate's Penance" or "The Bride's Bigamy" for their Sabbath reading, is it not possible that those fair voters of the future might substitute Mrs. Fawcett's interesting illustrations of political economy, or some outline of human physiology, their knowledge of which would bless an unborn generation?

I do not advocate the absurdity of a town library which should chiefly consist of authors like Plato and Professor Peirce. No one can doubt that the great majority of its volumes should be emphatically _popular_ in their character. They should furnish intelligible and interesting reading to the average graduate of the town schools. And there is no lack of such works. The outlines of physical and social science have been written by men of genius in simple and attractive style. History and biography in the hands of their masters give a healthy stimulus to the imagination, and tend to strengthen the character. The function of a town library should be to supply reading improving and interesting, and yet, in the best sense of the word, popular; and I maintain that this can be done, without setting up a rival agency to the news-stand, the book-club, and the weekly paper, for the circulation of the novels of the day.

There is a saying of Dr. Johnson, to the effect, that, if a boy be let loose in a library, he is likely to give himself a very fair education. But, in accepting this dictum, we must remember the sort of library the doctor had in his mind. As known to him, it was based upon solid volumes of systematized information. Besides these were the noblest poems of the world, a very few great romances, and ponderous tomes of controversial theology; good, healthy food, and much of it attractive to an unpampered boy-appetite.

But the range of a large library is by no means necessary to produce the soundest educational results. Can it be doubted that familiar knowledge of a small case of well-selected books--such, for instance, as the modest stipend of a country clergyman easily collects--is better for boy and girl than the liberty of devouring a thousand highly-flavored sweets in the free library? At all events, a few old-fashioned people do not question it. "A year ago," writes one of them, "Alice used to read Irving and Spenser, and Tom was dipping into Gibbon and Shakespeare; liking them well enough, yet preferring a game of base-ball to either, as it was proper he should. But the town library was opened, and these young people are found crouching over novels in out-of-the-way corners, when they ought to be at play; or reading surreptitiously at night, when they ought to be asleep." It is in vain to throw all the responsibility upon parents. American parents are very busy, and somewhat careless. Mrs. Fanny Firefly's highly-seasoned love-stories for girls, and Mr. Samuel Sensation's boy-novels and spiced preparations of boned history, are got up, like the port-wine drops of the confectioners, to tempt and to sell. And they do their work. No one can examine the average boy and girl of the period without being struck with their ignorance of the great works of English literature which young people of a former generation were accustomed to read with profit and delight.

The function of a town library is to supplement the town schools; to gratify the taste for knowledge which they should have imparted; and to serve as an instrument for that self-education to which there is no limit. But tax-payers are not bound to circulate twenty-seven thousand novels against nineteen hundred volumes of biography and seventeen hundred of history, according to the figures of one report; or to expend two-thirds of the working force of their establishment in sending out "novels and juveniles," according to the statement of another. In a word, information, not excitement, should be imbibed from the atmosphere of the town library. That prevailing infirmity of our time which seems to substitute sensibility for morality should there find small encouragement. But we shall never know what this institution might do for a community, so long as the temptation of free novels is thrust in the faces of all who enter. For it is not to be expected that our youth fresh from school, moving among the countless agitations of American life, will select reading that may require some mental exertion, so long as mental excitement is offered them in unlimited amounts.

I am well aware how much may be said for the story-tellers, and how many people there are to say it; and, whenever there is danger of their being unduly neglected, my voice shall be loudly raised in their behalf. But one may allow the claims of the romances, from Scheherazade to Mrs. Southworth, and yet maintain that the theory upon which the average town library is run is faulty. There is no virtue in despising cakes and ale, and the heat of ginger in the mouth may at times impart a wholesome glow to the entire system. But it does not quite follow that it is the function of American towns to supply these stimulants gratis, at the expense of their tax-payers. While we consider the immense amount of reading of a certain sort that a town library supplies, it is well to remember that there are other sorts of reading it may possibly prevent. For it may encourage reading precisely as prodigality encourages industry. Luxury and profusion do indeed feed industry, and demoralize it; but the industry which serves God by blessing man, they prevent from being fed. I fear that in these days more noble capacities die of a surfeit from too much poor reading, than starve from want of good books. The valid defence of institutions working in the interest of State education is this: they prevent a waste of power. When any one of them can be shown to encourage waste of power, it needs looking after. In our complex social condition, the real consequences of any government interference extend far beyond its apparent consequences. An institution may be very useful up to a certain point, and yet hurtful if allowed to run its full course without restraining criticism.

The managers of our smaller libraries are apt to be picked men, who give unrequited labor and intelligence to their trust. But they are chosen at town meetings,--and to a certain extent must carry out the wishes of their electors. Upon this matter, as upon most others, it is the duty of the thoughtful men and women to create a wholesome public opinion. They must recognize the fact that the change from a few good books to an unlimited supply of all sorts of books is by no means an unmixed advantage to a community. While the results of town libraries, taken in the aggregate, are undoubtedly good, it is our duty to consider whether they ought not to be better.

THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The public library had now passed the period of the merely academic advocacy exemplified in the Ticknor letter of 1851. It was an actual, functioning institution, and as such was called upon to answer criticism and to justify its existence. The atmosphere of apologetics begins to appear in what its friends have to say about it. This is evident in the extract from Col. Higginson's "Men and Women" (New York, 1888) which immediately follows. The author's comparison of the evolution of a library with that of a great railroad system is perhaps the first hint of a comprehensive vision of the library as something bigger than any individual town or city institution and beyond it.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born in Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 1823, and graduated at Harvard in 1841. He entered the ministry in 1847 but retired in 1858 and served in the Civil War. From that time until his death, May 9, 1911, he devoted himself to literature, publishing a large number of books.

Just as there is a good deal of anxiety wasted in regard to our free public schools, especially on the part of those who have never entered them, so there is some misplaced solicitude in regard to our libraries. The free town or city library is one of the few things in our democratic society that would have pleased the splenetic Carlyle, who mourned in one of his early letters that every village in England had its jail, but none its open library. It is a pity, therefore, when a man of high standing and great influence writes of these institutions thus hastily (I take the passage from a well-known literary journal): "Among the forms of beneficence for which our own generation has been conspicuous is the Free Library.... But it is, I apprehend, no exaggeration to say that such well-meant generosity has _oftener than otherwise_ (the italics are my own) been chilled and discouraged by its results. Appreciative readers are few, the best books are largely let alone, and the cost of the 'plant' and the taste which are put into it are often in most painful contrast to the appreciation which they have received." Now, while every count of this last sentence may be true indictment, it is easy to show how little it sustains the verdict. "Appreciative readers" are few in the most cultivated circles, if their appreciation must be tested by "the best books" only. It is not easy even to know what the best books are, if we may judge by the tiresome failures in making out the list of them; and suppose that they were known, do we find many clergymen or bishops who habitually read Plato, Aeschylus, and Dante, rather than "Ben-Hur" or "The lady or the tiger"? It does not therefore follow that people are unworthy of public libraries because "the best books are largely let alone"; the question is whether even the second best may not be good reading. We have the medical authority of Hippocrates for saying that the second best medicine may be better than the best, if the patient likes it best. So in regard to the fine buildings, the success of republican government happily does not depend on how far our citizens appreciate the architecture of the Capitol at Washington and the State House at Albany; and it is surely the same with libraries. Grant a few over-fine library buildings, built to please some private benefactor; grant a few mismanaged public libraries--though where these buildings or these libraries are I do not myself know--does the kindly writer of these lines mean to be understood as saying that "oftener than otherwise" our free public libraries are failures?

If he does, it can only be said that this remark adds another to the innumerable illustrations of that invaluable remark of Coleridge that we must take every man's testimony to the value of that which he does not know. All experience shows how easy it is to construct an institution out of one's own consciousness and then condemn it; we see this daily in what is written of our public school system. In General Butler's brief career as Governor of Massachusetts he made a severe attack upon the Normal Art School in Boston, and cited a pathetic instance of a fallen girl who undoubtedly (as he urged) received her first demoralization from the study of the nude in that school. It turned out on investigation that he himself had never entered the school, and that the young girl herself made no such charges; that there never had been any studying from nude models in the school; that she had attended it but a month or two, and this in its early days, when it did not possess so much as a plaster cast of a human foot or hand. No matter; the charge was reiterated up to the very end of His Excellency's career in office, and is believed by many worthy people of this day. It is equally easy to bring general charges against public libraries, and equally hard to remove their impression, however unjust and even cruel they may be.

What are the facts? There has just been a great Librarians' Convention assembled from all parts of the country, and keeping together for many days. Did a single speaker at that Convention take the ground that "oftener than otherwise" the benefactors of public libraries were chilled and discouraged? On the contrary, it was reported that such benefactors were never so active, and their benefactions were never so large. The tone was not one of discouragement, but of buoyancy and hope. Every one admitted the vastness of the educational engine created by the free library system; every one had his own suggestion by way of improvement or development, but every one expressed a cordial faith in the community, and reported encouragement in all work well done. The simple truth is that the creation of a system of such libraries is like the creation of a great railway system; it must be an evolution, not a creation outright. The wisest librarian in America fifty years ago had no more conception of the free library system of to-day than had Benjamin Franklin of our postal methods; nor can any one now foresee what fifty years of development will do for either.

The truth is that every step in any great organization brings out new possibilities, new dangers, and new resources. Side by side with the perils of free libraries--as of too much light reading, and the absence of proper appreciation of the best things--there are evoked resources to meet these dangers.

Outside the library there come up the "association to promote study at home," and the vast Chautauqua "reading circles"--all these being essentially based on the free library system, and implying it for their full development. Inside the library there grow up such methods as those of Mr. S.S. Green, City Librarian of Worcester, Massachusetts, whose ways of making such an institution useful to all sorts and conditions of the people may take rank with Rowland Hill's improvements in postal service, as to their results on democratic civilization. He has succeeded in linking the library and the public schools so closely that he and the teachers acting in concurrence, indirectly control the reading of the whole generation that is growing up in that city. The details must be sought in his reports--as, for instance, one from the Library Journal of March, 1887, which is printed as a leaflet; but the essential thing in managing libraries, as in managing schools, is to have faith in the community in which one lives, and to believe that people do, as the Scripture has it, "covet earnestly the best gifts," if you will only show them how those best gifts are to be obtained. Put into school and library methods one-half the organizing ability brought to bear on railways and telegraphs, and we shall stand astonished at the results within our reach. Those already attained, if fairly looked at, are sufficient to encourage any one. The writer has at two different times and in two different States been a director in these institutions. Whenever he needed a little stimulus toward doing his duty it was his custom to go and look over the rack containing the books lately brought back by readers. With all necessary deduction for the love of fiction--a love shared in these days by the wisest and best--the proportion of sensible and useful reading was always such as to vindicate the immense value of the free public libraries.

TWO FUNDAMENTALS

Mary Salome Cutler, now Mrs. Milton Fairchild, is the first librarian to be quoted in this symposium. A sketch of her appears in Vol. II. of this series. In the paragraphs quoted below which form part of a paper read by Miss Cutler, then vice-director of the New York State Library School, before the Pennsylvania Library Club and printed in _The Library Journal_ (October, 1896), appears a definite recognition of the social character of the library's task. Her two fundamentals--organization and human feelings--are both decided elements in its socialization.

In considering library interests we do well, I think, not to confine ourselves to the limited range of library subjects.

That mysterious thing which we call society is growing more complex, every part more curiously intertwined with every other part, each human life bearing some relation to every other human life. Whether he will or no, it is literally true that "no man liveth to himself alone." If it were possible, then, as a part of this organism to discover some of the laws which govern the whole, we might come back to our special domain with an application of the laws which would have the force of freshness. I believe that we gain an insight into these controlling principles only by yielding to the tendency of solidarity, by opening ourselves to surrounding influences, by living the fullest life of which we are capable. I think I have seen the workings of two of these laws which have a close relation to each other. If I am right your experience will confirm mine, and we can together make the application to what concerns us most--the library interests of to-day.

In any undertaking results depend directly, and often largely, upon the perfection of organization. Organization implies a mind which can grasp the undertaking as a whole, follow it out, each step in detail, estimate the various factors, personal and impersonal, provide for unforeseen contingencies, and furnish the faith, the will-power, the personal magnetism, whatever you choose to call it, in such measure as is needed to carry it through. Such a mind sees the end at the beginning, and thinks of it as already done while to others it may seem far off and even impossible. Such thought, often the work of one mind, sometimes the result of cooperation, is behind every piece of accomplished work. Other elements may doubtless be essential, but there can be no adequate results without organization. And, making allowance for other elements, the perfection of results depends upon the perfection of organization....

For the reason of this tendency we have not far to seek. I believe it is found in the scientific spirit of the age, which is surely pervading every sphere of human thought and activity. The careful investigation of facts, the deduction of the law from the phenomena, the distrust of chance and the loyalty to the law deduced, all of which evidence the scientific spirit, mark alike the great financier, diplomatist, inventor, philanthropist.

In some undertakings organization alone will suffice. For example, making a machine, laying out a railroad, compiling a volume of statistics. In others there must needs come in what I will call the human element, the consideration of people, not in masses, but as individuals, that matchless, indescribable quality which we call human sympathy....

Illustrations might be multiplied in educational, religious, and philanthropic efforts where we work for the masses, and forget that each one of the mass is a human being with passions, sensibilities, aspirations like our own. This interest in the human being as such, which is a gift to some, can be cultivated, but it can never be simulated. The counterfeit always rings false. Joined to a good memory for names and faces, it gives a person a power which can hardly be estimated....

It seems to me that these two principles apply with tremendous and unusual force to the problems of the modern library. I will speak of the public library alone because it has a wider reach and a closer touch on life.

We will review in imagination the library situation in this country. We take up Mr. Flint's Statistics volume for 1893; we sum up 593 free libraries in the New England states, 520 in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, 285 in the Southern states, 758 in the Western states, a total of 2156 free libraries.

We recall our friends in the American Library Association, who constitute with some marked exceptions, who prefer to work alone, the high-water mark of the fraternity. As their names pass before us we take a measure of the men and women. We think of their libraries which we may have visited, or, better still, which we have used as readers. In some few cases we know the influence of these libraries in the town or city. Take it for all in all we find a body of hard-working men and women translating into practice noble ideals. As a result, the library is beginning to get a hold upon the community. But it is only a beginning and, compared with the possibilities, only a prophecy of what may and will be. Are not the failures in our work due to the lack of the best organization and the true human touch?

A librarian is appointed, let us say, to an important post. He has doubtless had experience in library work. He comes on to consult with the trustees. They vote to send him on a trip for getting ideas from other libraries. He probably has on his hands a beautiful building illy adapted to library work. He carries the plans with him, and spends most of the time with other members of the craft, in choosing the least of several evils in placing the reference-room, catalog, charging-desk, etc. He secures two or three assistants with training, experience, or both, and fills the minor places with local help chosen by examination or by luck or by personal favor. He learns in a general way the character of the town and selects books with that in view. If there are certain manufacturing interests or a particular foreign population, he makes large purchases in those lines. He decides on a system of classification, of cataloging, and on a method of charging. The books are rushed through the various processes, though all too slowly for an impatient public. In a few months at the latest the big educational plant begins to be utilized.

The circulation surprises the most sanguine, the average of fiction drops a little below the usual mark, good service is done at the information or reference desk by the enthusiastic man or woman having it in charge, work is begun with the schools, and a little fraction of teachers make the children know books because they know books themselves. The rest go through the motions. The bookworm fills his corner, the chronic grumbler has his little say, the usual number of prize questions are answered. The library becomes the very bread of life to those who are ready to receive it, and gives refreshment and suggestion and inspiration to many more. The profession approves. At the next A.L.A. meeting Mr. ---- is brought forward more prominently, and the wise ones say, "I always thought he was a rising man."

But only 20 per cent. of the population ever set foot within the library, and when a stranger asks the way within a block of the building, a fairly intelligent-looking workman does not appear to know there is such a thing as the public library.

In looking over the proceedings of the library association for the 18 years of its existence, we are struck by the evidences of industry and earnestness. There are papers and discussions on libraries and schools, access to the shelves, bookbinding, systems of classification, cataloging rules. The keynote is cooperation in securing, with an enthusiasm which amounts to missionary zeal, the best and most uniform methods, with special reference to mechanical devices. The very motto smacks of arithmetic and commerce. "The best reading for the largest number at the least cost." All this is good and proper in its place. Wise methods are essential to the best results. But we sought in vain all along the years for the philosophic insight which should grasp the higher motive of our profession and connect it with the great struggles of our modern life. After the Columbus year in the clearer air of the mountain-top, the word for which we were waiting came. I wish it were possible to stop right here and give you the papers of Mr. Larned and Mr. Brett, which were read at Lake Placid, as well as the discussion which followed. I must content myself by quoting Mr. Larned's last sentence: "Those of us who have faith in the future of democracy can only hold our faith fast by believing that the knowledge of the learned, the wisdom of the thoughtful, the conscience of the upright, will some day be common enough to prevail, always, over every factious folly and every mischievous movement that evil minds or ignorance can set astir. When that blessed time of victory shall have come, there will be many to share the glory of it; but none among them will rank rightly before those who have led and inspired the work of the public libraries."

This leads us to the first great need of the profession to-day, that the librarian should be in the noblest sense a large, man, that he should add to executive and business ability and technical knowledge a broad and generous culture in Matthew Arnold's sense of the word, "An inward spiritual activity, having for its character increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy." He must be an omnivorous reader, skimming many books, and knowing by instinct which books and which chapters and sentences to read carefully. He must study from books and in life the great industrial, social, and religious questions which stir our age. He must be a scholar without pedantry, a man of the world without indifference, a friend of the people without sentimentality.

There follows naturally the second necessity, that the librarian should be a careful student of his own town. He should know its history and topography, its social, political, business, literary, and ecclesiastical life. To this end he should have a personal acquaintance with the city officers, the party bosses, the labor leaders, members of the board of trade, manufacturers, leading women in society, with the clergy, with the school superintendent and the teachers, with those who shape the charitable organizations, with reporters, policemen, and reformers.

To what end? Broadly that he may catch the spirit of the civic life and relate the library to the whole as the organs to the body. Specifically, that he may reach the entire population through the natural leaders, that he may select books, establish branches, open up new avenues of communication between the library and the people.

The church may be aristocratic, industry, trade, and politics a war, the public school like the drinking-fountain, though planned for the many scorned by the few. I believe it is possible for a man with a broad and sympathetic knowledge of our age and an intimate knowledge of his own city, to make of the public library the one common meeting-place, the real focus of democratic ideas. The church and the school will reach this in the future, the library may achieve it to-day.

There is a third difficulty, which is a very real and palpable one. The librarian himself may have a fairly high ideal of the library which is shared by perhaps one or two assistants. The bulk of the work in a library with a large circulation is done by young persons of less opportunity and training. Each has a distinct part of the work to do with little idea of its relation to the whole. Unfortunately the loan-desk, registration-desk, and reading-room are usually manned in this way. I have often stood amazed at the delivery-desk of librarians whose names represent all that is best in the library profession. I would not be understood as depreciating the work of the lower assistants in our libraries. I know well that this service, as a whole, represents an amount of faithfulness and devotion which it ill becomes me to undervalue. The responsibility lies with the head of the library and the failure comes from lack of organization. The appointing power should be practically in his hands. The man whom we have described above does not need to seek this power. It comes to him. It is surely possible to secure for the library service young men and women, boys and girls, of fair intelligence, quick wits, responsive minds, and human sympathies. The making of these units into an organism is the severest test of a librarian's power. The ability of a general is not enough. He must himself have the real human touch or he cannot call it forth from others. There must be the promptness, the accuracy, the despatch which marks military discipline; there must be also an intelligent conception of the purpose of the library, a strong sense of personal responsibility and of the dignity and beauty of the public service. It is sometimes said that spirit of the library should be that of a merchant and his well-trained clerks, anxious to please their customers. It should be rather the fine spirit of a hostess with the daughters of the house about her greeting her guests.

There is a fourth failure which is perhaps the root difficulty. It is the failure to make the most of time. The day opens. The man hastens to his place and finds a score of voices calling him to as many different tasks. He hastily begins the one which seems to call the loudest, and has just begun to gather up the threads of thought when there is a peremptory call in another direction. And so he is driven through the day, not controlling, but controlled, and constantly lashed by the thought of neglected duties. By dint of keeping at it all through the day and often into the night much work is done. The man gets and deserves the reputation of a hard-working man, deliberately sacrificing health, ease, leisure, and the joys of a scholar's life for the public good.

Now this is the first and natural result of the enlarged conception of a librarian's work. The man is dazed by the sense of responsibility and almost crushed by the demands upon his time apparently separate and conflicting. But this should be considered only the first process from which the strong man will speedily evolve a wiser way. The fatal mistake lies in considering this first stage inevitable and final. If a man tarries here it argues limitation, not power. There certainly are men who stand high in public life as well as those holding less prominent positions, who accomplish an enormous amount of work with a sense of freedom and an impression of leisure. As I have observed individual cases, I am led to the conclusion that the explanation lies not in a stronger physique, or a stronger intellect, but in a better organization of work with reference to time. There is no need more imperative than this for all of us who are proud to be called busy people. The trouble is, we think we are too busy to stop and plan. Our philosophic error lies in believing that the work must all be done to-day. Nature herself should teach us that the best work cannot be done in a hurry.

We may not hope in this generation to understand well the working of that complex, mysterious thing which we call human society, but we may at least so relate ourselves and our libraries to it that we may live, move, and grow together.

"Not unrelated, ununified, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect Nature's every part Rooted in the mighty Heart."

WHAT A LIBRARY SHOULD BE AND WHAT IT CAN DO

No one has done more to inspire library workers with the feeling that what they are doing is worth while than Dr. Melvil Dewey, pioneer in this country of the modern library and of the socialized library spirit. A sketch of Dr. Dewey will be found in Vol. I. of this series. The following is from the stenographer's report of a brief talk at the Atlanta Conference of the American Library Association, as printed in _Public Libraries_ (Chicago, June, 1899).

Atlanta has been known long in this country as a southern city that believes supremely that education pays, and as the revelation has come late in this century of what the library is or should be, and what the library can do, on this line I will say a few words to you tonight.

We have had an illustration in the recent war with Spain that education pays, in what it means to have the man behind the guns trained. We have an illustration in Mr. Carnegie's work, whose name has been mentioned here in his competition with the rest of the world, illustrating another peculiar American feature that American education pays in dollars and cents; but it is a more recent conception of the part the library has in a system of public education. It took a thousand years to develop our educational system from the university down; first the university as the beginning of all education, and then we must have the colleges to prepare for the universities, the academies and common schools to prepare for the colleges, and it is only in our own generation that we have come to understand that we must begin with the kindergarten and end in our libraries.

I am really pleased tonight that the Young men's association has done this generous work, and that Atlanta is going to pay the money from the taxes. It would be no advantage to this city if your schools were provided for you without charge to the people. Those who study the question from the low plane of dollars and cents, without regard to the higher things in life, have learned that no investigation pays well. In many a community men are giving liberally to the schools, and are beginning to give liberally to the libraries, and they do it because they know it makes everything more valuable--it makes their business more prosperous.

The library is going through the same process the public school went through. Henry Barnard, of Connecticut, visited 27 different states and spoke before them to urge upon them the system of public education, and to provide a guidance for the children.

It is true that the educated parents are more likely to have children educated highly, but there is no question whatever that the great majority of the men and women who are to shape the future of this country will be born in the humblest homes, and we come back to the problem of the general education of all the people as the best possible advancement and the chiefest defense of the nation; it is the concern of the state because it is the duty of the state, because it pays, and because the state does not dare any longer to neglect it. Therefore I call your attention to the fact that we are repeating in libraries exactly the process of the school, and that there were meetings to urge the acceptance of them. There are few who doubt the wisdom of donating money to support the free library, and when the history of the time is written it will be marked as the history of free libraries.

Why is it that the people are taxing themselves erecting beautiful buildings, buying books, paying salaries, printing catalogs, incurring all these expenses, paying out an amount of money that a short time ago would have been thought only a dream? It is a recognition of its necessity and importance. We understand that it is a good thing.

A broad conception at the end of the century of the work of the schools is simply this, to teach the children to think accurately, with strength and with speed. If it is in the school that they get their start, then where do they get their education? Tell me from your own experience, was it from the school that you got most of your ideas? We had an experiment some time ago, when the teachers of New York made an elaborate investigation as to the teaching of boys and girls. The thing that influenced those boys and girls most was the books they read. What, after all, is the supreme end of education? I state that we should teach them to think with accuracy and with speed, but I doubt if there is one who denies the supreme necessity of the building of character. That is what is winning in the peaceful conflicts of commerce. If you care to analyze how character is built, follow it back briefly. Character comes from habits, and habits from actions repeated, and actions from a motive, and a motive from reflection. What makes me reflect? What makes you reflect? What is the cause? Isn't it something that you have read in a book, a magazine, or a paper? So the genealogy is this: reading begets reflection, reflection begets motive, motive begets action, and action begets habit, and habit begets that supreme thing--character. So we have come to recognize that if we are to accomplish the chief end that is before the people, we must strive to control the reading for others.

Reading sometimes carries downhill, as it often carries upward, and there is no way that we can reach the people except through the free library and with proper help from the people.

What Atlanta wants to make out of her citizens is not to train privates, but to train officers. If you go out on the streets you can find a thousand men to do the work of a laborer, where you can find only a few to do the work that will demand five or ten thousand dollars. The world is looking for that class of men. It is the highest salaried man that is the hardest to find. If you would buy a machine, there enters into it the material that is in it; the process of manufacture throughout which has transformed it, and then the approved fitness for performing its functions. The same way with a man--the native that is manufactured; then comes the experience which proves the fitness for his work; and you pay the salary for these things. And by means of our schools and libraries we must reach these girls and boys.

Thomas Edison and other great men say that their whole lives are governed from reading a single book. So the province of the library is to amuse, to inform and inspire. We have the old proverbs, As free as air; As free as water; but the new one that is important to the race is, As free as knowledge. The people of this state cannot afford to have any boy in Georgia who is anxious to know more, how to make his life more valuable, who wants inspiration and is ready to read, and not furnish it to him. Education is the chief concern of the American people, and the states that have done most for their education have been the most prosperous.

It is the concern of the richest as to what should be done for the poorest; you should provide free schools and free libraries, or the failure to do so will react in your own lives. If you say that this ideal is too high, that the library has important functions, but it does not take its place as the equal of the schools, it is because you have not studied this question in all its details. When you do, you will be forced to the conclusion that while we must say that this is the inspiration of a dreamer, remember that it is the devotion of noble minds that never falters, but endures and waits for all it can find, and what it cannot find, creates.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN AMERICAN LIFE

As the last of this particular group of papers we reproduce a view of our public library system by a foreigner who had lived in this country long enough to appreciate it and who was yet able to contrast it with the library systems of European countries--Prof. Munsterberg of Harvard.

Hugo Munsterberg was born in Danzig, Germany, June 1, 1863, educated at Leipzig and Heidelberg, and after serving as assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, became professor of psychology at Harvard in 1892, where he served until his death on Dec. 16, 1916. The subjoined extract is from his book "The Americans" (New York, 1904).

The American's fondness for reading finds clearest expression in the growth of libraries, and in few matters of civilization is America so well fitted to teach the Old World a lesson. Europe has many large and ancient collections of books, and Germany more than all the rest; but they serve only one single purpose--that of scientific investigation; they are the laboratories of research. They are chiefly lodged with the great universities, and even the large municipal libraries are mostly used by those who need material for productive labors, or wish to become conversant with special topics.

Exactly the same type of large library has grown up in America; and here, too, it is chiefly the universities whose stock of books is at the service of the scientific world. Besides these, there are special libraries belonging to learned societies, state law libraries, special libraries of government bureaus and of museums, and largest of all the Library of Congress. The collection of such scientific books began at the earliest colonial period, and at first under theological auspices. The Calvinist Church, more than any other, inclined to the study of books. As early as 1790 the catalog of Harvard College contained 350 pages, of which 150 were taken up by theological works. Harvard has to-day almost a million books, mostly in the department of literature, philology, history, philosophy, and jurisprudence. There are, moreover, in Boston the state library of law, with over a hundred thousand volumes; the Athenaeum, with more than two hundred thousand books; the large scientific library of the Institute of Technology, and many others. Similarly, in other large cities, the university libraries are the nucleus for scientific labors, and are surrounded by admirable special libraries, particularly in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Then, too, the small academic towns, like Princeton, Ithaca, New Haven, and others, have valuable collections of books, which in special subjects are often unique. For many years the American university libraries have been the chief purchasers of the special collections left by deceased European professors. And it often happens, especially through the gift of grateful alumni, that collections of the greatest scientific value, which could not be duplicated, come into the possession even of lesser institutions.

In many departments of investigation, Washington takes the lead with the large collection of the various scientific, economic, and technical bureaus of the government. The best known of these is the unique medical library of the War Department. Then there is the Library of Congress, with many more than a million volumes, which today has an official right to one copy of every book published in the United States, and so may claim to be a national library. It is still not comparable to the many-sided and complete collection of the British Museum; the national library is one-sided, or at least shows striking gaps. Having started as the Library of Congress, it has, aside from its one copy of every American book and the books on natural science belonging to the Smithsonian Institution, few books except those on politics, history, political economy, and law. The lack of space for books, which existed until a few years ago, made it seem inexpedient to spend money for purposes other than the convenience of congressmen. But the American people, in its love for books, has now erected such a building as the world had never before seen devoted to the storing of books. The new Congressional Library was opened in 1897, and since the stacks have still room for several million volumes, the library will soon grow to an all-round completeness like that at London. This Library has a specially valuable collection of manuscripts and correspondences.

All the collections of books which we have so far mentioned are virtually like those of Germany. But since they mostly date from the nineteenth century, the American libraries are more modern, and contain less dead weight in the way of unused folios. Much more important is their greatly superior accessibility. Their reading-rooms are more comfortable and better lighted, their catalogs more convenient, library hours longer, and, above all, books are more easily and quickly delivered. Brooks Adams said recently, about the library at Washington as a place for work, that this building is well-nigh perfect; it is large, light, convenient, and well provided with attendants. In Paris and London, one works in dusty, forbidding, and overcrowded rooms, while here the reading-rooms are numerous, attractive, and comfortable. In the National Library at Paris, one has to wait an hour for a book; in the British Museum, half an hour, and in Washington, five minutes. This rapid service, which makes such a great difference to the student, is found everywhere in America; and everywhere the books are housed in buildings which are palatial, although perhaps not so beautiful as the Washington Library.

Still, all these differences are unessential; in principle the academic libraries are alike in the New and Old Worlds. The great difference between Europe and America begins with the libraries which are not learned, but which are designed to serve popular education. The American public library which is not for science, but for education, is to the European counterpart as the Pullman express train to the village post-chaise.

The scientific libraries of Boston, including that of Harvard University, contain nearly two million printed works; but the largest library of all is distinct from these. It is housed on Copley Square, in a renaissance palace by the side of the Art Museum, and opposite the most beautiful church in America. The staircase of yellow marble, the wonderful wall-paintings, the fascinating arcade on the inner court and the sunlit halls are indeed beautiful. And in and out, from early morning till late evening, week-day and Sunday, move the people of Boston. The stream of men divides in the lower vestibule. Some go to the newspaper room, where several hundred daily newspapers, a dozen of them German, hang on racks. Others wander to the magazine rooms, where the weekly and monthly papers of the world are waiting to be read. Others ascend to the upper stories, where Sargent's famous pictures of the Prophets allure the lover of art, in order to look over more valuable special editions and the art magazines, geographical charts, and musical works. The largest stream of all goes to the second floor, partly into the huge quiet reading-room, partly into the rotunda, which contains the catalog, partly into the hall containing the famous frescoes of the Holy Grail, where the books are given out. Here a million and a half books are delivered every year to be taken home and read. And no one has to wait; an apparatus carries the applicant's card with wonderful speed to the stacks, and the desired book is sent back in automatic cars. Little children meanwhile wander into the juvenile room, where they find the best books for children. And everything invites even the least patient reader to sit down quietly with some sort of a volume--everything is so tempting, so convenient and comfortable, and so surpassingly beautiful. And all this is free to the humblest working-man.

And still, if the citizen of Massachusetts were to be asked of what feature of the public libraries he is most proud, he would probably not mention this magnificent palace in Boston, the capital of the state, but rather the 350 free public libraries scattered through the smaller cities and towns of this state, which is after all only one-third as large as Bavaria. It is these many libraries which do the broadest work for the people. Each little collection, wherever it is, is the center of intellectual and moral enlightenment, and plants and nourishes the desire for self-perfection. Of course, Massachusetts has done more in this respect than any other ward in this respect. But there is no longer any city of moderate size which has not a large public library, and there is no state which does encourage in every possible way the establishment of public libraries in every small community, giving financial aid if it is necessary.

Public libraries have become the favorite Christmas present of philanthropists, and while the hospitals, universities, and museums, have still no reason for complaint, the churches now find the superfluous millions are less apt to go to gay church windows than to well chosen book collections. In the year 1900 there existed more than 5383 public libraries having over a thousand volumes; of these 144 had more than fifty thousand, and 54 had more than a hundred thousand volumes. All together contained, according to the statistics of 1900 more than forty-four million volumes and more than seven million pamphlets; and the average growth was over 8 per cent. There are probably to-day, therefore, fifteen million volumes more on the shelves. The many thousand libraries which have fewer than 999 books are over and above all this.

The make-up of such public libraries may be seen from the sample catalog gotten out by the Library Association a few years since, as a typical collection of five thousand books. This catalog, which, with the exception of the most important foreign classics, contains only books in English, including, however, many translations, contains 227 general reference books, 756 books on history, 635 on biography, 413 on travel, 355 on natural science, 694 on belles-lettres, 809 novels, 225 on art, 220 on religion, 424 on social science, 268 on technical subjects, etc. The cost of this sample collection is $12,000. The proportions between the several divisions are about the same in larger collections. In smaller collections, belles-lettres have a somewhat greater share. The general interest taken by the nation in this matter is shown by the fact that the first edition of 20,000 copies of this sample catalog, of 600 pages, was soon exhausted.

The many-sidedness of this catalog points also to the manifold functions of the public library. It is meant to raise the educational level of the people, and this can be done in three ways: first, interest may be stimulated along new lines; second, those who wish to perfect themselves in their own subjects or in whatsoever special topics, may be provided with technical literature; and third, the general desire for literary entertainment may be satisfied by books of the best or at least not of the worst sort. The directors of libraries see their duties to lie in all three directions. The libraries guide the tastes and interests of the general public, and try to replace the ordinary servant-girl's novel with the best romance of the day and shallow literature with works that are truly instructive. And no community is quite content until its public library has become a sort of general meeting-place and substitute for the saloon and the club. America is the working-man's paradise, and attractive enough to the rich man; but the ordinary man of the middle classes, who in Germany finds his chief comfort in the Bierhalle would find little comfort in America if it were not for the public library, which offers him a home. Thus the public library has come to be a recognized instrument of culture along with the public school; and in all American outposts the school teacher and librarian are among the pioneers.

The learned library cannot do this. To be sure, the university library can help to spread information, and conversely the public library makes room for thousands of volumes on all sorts of scientific topics. But the emphasis is laid very differently in the two cases, and if it were not so neither library would best fulfil its purpose. The extreme quiet of the reference library and the bustle and stir of the public library do not go together. In the one direction America has followed the dignified traditions of Europe; in the other, it has opened new paths and travelled on at a rapid pace. Every year discovers new ideas and plans, new schemes for equipment and the selection of books, for cataloging, and for otherwise gaining in utility. When, for instance, the library in Providence commenced to post a complete list of books and writings pertaining to the subject of every lecture that was given in the city, it was the initiation of a great movement. The juvenile departments are the product of recent years, and are constantly increasing in popularity. There are even, in some cases, departments for blind readers. The state commissions are new, and so also the travelling libraries, which are carried from one village to another.

The great schools for librarians are also new. The German librarian is mostly a scholar; but the American believes that he has improved on the European library systems, not so much by his ample financial resources as by having broken with the academic custom, and having secured librarians with a special library training. And since there are such officials in many thousand libraries, and the great institutions create a constant demand for such persons, the library schools, which offer generally a three years' course, having been found very successful.

Admittedly, all this technical apparatus is expensive; the Boston library expends every year a quarter of a million dollars for administrative expenses. But the American taxpayer supports this more gladly than any other burden, knowing that the public library is the best weapon against alcoholism and crime, against corruption and discontent, and that the democratic country can flourish only when the instinct of self-perfection as it exists in every American is thoroughly satisfied.

BOOKS AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

This paper and the two that follow it relate specifically to reading as fostered by the public library and yet not sufficiently to the provision of books to the public as a definite library service to warrant postponing them to the section relating to that branch of community service. They have a somewhat academic or "literary flavor," and yet are permeated not with the idea of "books for scholars" but with that of "books for people"--the idea of reading as a universal function--duty, pleasure and inspiration in one--which is distinctly that of a socialized library. The first paper is an address made by Lowell at the opening of the new public library building at Chelsea, Mass., Dec. 22, 1885.

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819, and graduated at Harvard in 1838, succeeding Longfellow as professor of Literature there in 1855. He edited _The North American Review_ in 1863-72, served as U.S. minister to Spain in 1877-80 and to Great Britain in 1880-85. He died in Cambridge, Aug. 12, 1891.

"A few years ago my friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland, published a very interesting volume which he called "The book-lover's euchiridion," the handbook, that is to say, of those who love books. It was made up of extracts from the writings of a great variety of distinguished men, ancient and modern, in praise of books. It was a chorus of many voices in many tongues, a hymn of gratitude and praise, full of such piety and fervor as can be parelleled only in songs dedicated to the supreme power, the supreme wisdom and the supreme love. Nay, there is a glow of enthusiasm and sincerity in it which is often painfully wanting in those other too commonly mechanical compositions. We feel at once that here it is out of the fulness of the heart, yes, and of the head, too, that the mouth speaketh. Here was none of that compulsory commonplace which is wont to characterize those 'testimonials of celebrated authors,' by means of which publishers sometimes strive to linger out the passages of a hopeless book toward its _requiescat_ in oblivion. These utterances which Mr. Ireland has gathered lovingly together are stamped with that spontaneousness which is the mint mark of all sterling speech. It is true that they are mostly, as is only natural, the utterances of literary men, and there is a well-founded proverbial distrust of herring that bear only the brand of the packer, and not that of the sworn inspector. But to this objection a cynic might answer with the question, 'Are authors so prone, then, to praise the works of other people that we are to doubt them when they do it un-asked?' Perhaps the wisest thing I could have done to-night would have been to put upon the stand some of the more weighty of this cloud of witnesses. But since your invitation implied that I should myself say something, I will endeavor to set before you a few of the commonplaces of the occasion, as they may be modified by passing through my own mind, or by having made themselves felt in my own experience.

The greater part of Mr. Ireland's witnesses testify to the comfort and consolation they owe to books, to the refuge they have found in them from sorrow or misfortune, to their friendship, never estranged and outliving all others. This testimony they volunteered. Had they been asked, they would have borne evidence as willingly to the higher and more general uses of books in their service to the commonwealth, as well as to the individual man. Consider, for example, how a single page of Burke may emancipate the young student of politics from narrow views and merely contemporaneous judgments. Our English ancestors, with that common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that:

"When land and goods are gone and spent, Then learning is most excellent";

and this is true, so far as it goes, though it goes, perhaps, hardly far enough. The law also calls only the earth and what is immovably attached to it _real_ property, but I am of opinion that those only are real possessions which abide with a man after he has been stripped of those others falsely so called, and which alone save him from seeming and from being the miserable forked radish to which the bitter scorn of Lear degraded every child of Adam. The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot be alienated. But they may be shared, they may be distributed, and it is the object and office of a free public library to perform these beneficial functions.

"Books," says Wordsworth, "are a real world," and he was thinking, doubtless, of such books as are not merely the triumphs of pure intellect, however supreme, but of those in which intellect infused with the sense of beauty aims rather to produce delight than conviction, or, if conviction, then through intuition rather than formal logic, and, leaving what Donne wisely calls

"Unconscious things, matters of fact,"

to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal expression to the abiding realities of the spiritual world for which the outward and visible world serves at best but as the husk and symbol. Am I wrong in using the word _realities_?--wrong in insisting on the distinction between the real and the actual? in assuming for the ideal an existence as absolute and self-subsistent as that which appeals to our senses--nay, so often cheats them in the matter of fact? How very small a part of the world we truly live in is represented by what speaks to us through the senses when compared with that vast realm of the mind which is peopled by memory and imagination, and with such shining inhabitants! These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span, yet infinite as space and time? And in what, I pray, are those we gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than the personages of fiction? Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? Does Caesar, does Alaric, hold existence by any other or stronger tenure than the Christian of Bunyan or the Don Quixote of Cervantes or the Antigone of Sophocles? Is not the history which is luminous because of an indwelling and perennial truth to nature, because of that light which never was on land or sea, really _more_ true, in the highest sense, than many a weary chronicle with names, date, and place in which "an Amurath to Amurath succeeds"? Do we know as much of any authentic Danish prince as of Hamlet?

But to come back a little nearer to Chelsea and the occasion that has called us together. The founders of New England, if sometimes, when they found it needful, an impracticable, were always a practical people. Their first care, no doubt, was for an adequate supply of powder, and they encouraged the manufacture of musket bullets by enacting that they should pass as currency at a farthing each--a coinage nearer to its nominal value, and not heavier than some with which we are familiar. Their second care was that "good learning should not perish from among us," and to this end they at once established the Latin School in Boston, and soon after the college at Cambridge. The nucleus of this was, as you all know, the bequest in money by John Harvard. Hardly less important, however, was the legacy of his library, a collection of good books, inconsiderable measured by the standard of to-day, but very considerable then as the possession of a private person. From that little acorn what an oak has sprung, and from its acorn again what a vocal forest, as old Howell would have called it--old Howell, whom I love to cite, because his name gave their title to the 'Essays of Elia,' and is borne with slight variation by one of the most delightful of modern authors! It was, in my judgment, those two foundations, more than anything else, which gave to New England character its bent and to Boston that literary supremacy which, I am told, she is in danger of losing, but which she will not lose till she and all the world lose Holmes.

The opening of a free public library, then, is a most important event in the history of any town. A college training is an excellent thing; but, after all, the better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself, and it is for this that a good library should furnish the opportunity and the means. I have sometimes thought that our public schools undertook to teach too much, and that the older system, which taught merely the three R's, and taught them well, leaving natural selection to decide who should go farther, was the better. However this may be, all that is primarily needful in order to use a library is the ability to read. I say primarily, for there must also be the inclination, and, after that, some guidance in reading well. Formerly the duty of a librarian was considered too much that of a watchdog to keep people as much as possible away from the books, and to hand these over to his successor as little worn by use as he could. Librarians now, it is pleasant to see, have a different notion of their trust, and are in the habit of preparing for the direction of the inexperienced lists of such books as they think best worth reading. Cataloging has also, thanks in great measure to American librarians, become a science, and catalogs, ceasing to be labyrinths without a clew, are furnished with finger-posts at every turn. Subject catalogs again save the beginner a vast deal of time and trouble, by supplying him for nothing with one at least of the results of thorough scholarship, the knowing where to look for what he wants. I do not mean by this that there is or can be any short-cut to learning, but that there may be, and is, such a short-cut to information that will make learning more easily accessible.

But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key that admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination; to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed and witness unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London, accompanying Caesar on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his fellow-conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the asking--a society, too, which will not involve them in ruinous expense and still more ruinous waste of time and health and faculties?

Southey tells us that, in his walk, one stormy day, he met an old woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, '_any_ weather was better than none!' I should be half inclined to say that any reading was better than none, allaying the crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that, though 'all deacons are good, there's odds in deacons.' Among books, certainly there is much variety of company, ranging from the best to the worst, from Plato to Zola, and the first lesson in reading well is that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed matter. The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put into our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory? There is a Wallachian legend which, like most of the figments of popular fancy, has a moral in it. One Bakala, a good-for-nothing kind of fellow in his way, having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to God, is taken up into heaven. He finds the Almighty sitting in something like the best room of a Wallachian peasant's cottage--there is always something profoundly pathetic in the homeliness of the popular imagination, forced, like the princess in the fairy tale, to weave its semblance of gold tissue out of straw. On being asked what reward he desires for the good service he has done, Bakala, who had always passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half wornout one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakala goes back to earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue's end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends, and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in. Cato's advice, _cum bonis ambula_, consort with the good, is quite as true if we extend it to books, for they, too, insensibly give away their own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon upward or drag down. And it is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A man is known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not only so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council room, but the soul, which God meant to be the spacious chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together, shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the meaner company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies against our better selves. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with a network of speaking wires to inform us of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas! it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences. It is we who, while we might each in his humble way be helping our fellows into the right path, or adding one block to the climbing spire of a fine soul, are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip.

One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or still better to choose some one great author, and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For remember that there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge--that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or indeed for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should 'browse in a library,' as Dr. Johnson called it, 'to their hearts' content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a "full man," as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson's memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. "Read not," says Lord Bacon, in his "Essay of Studies," "to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested--that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. _Some books also may be read by deputy._" This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes.

I have been speaking of such books as should be chosen for profitable reading. A public library, of course, must be far wider in its scope. It should contain something for all tastes, as well as the material for a thorough grounding in all branches of knowledge. It should be rich in books of reference, in encyclopaedias, where one may learn without cost of research what things are generally known. For it is far more useful to know these than to know those that are _not_ generally known. Not to know them is the defect of those half trained and therefore hasty men who find a mare's nest on every branch of the tree of knowledge. A library should contain ample stores of history, which, if it do not always deserve the pompous title which Bolingbroke gave it, of philosophy teaching by example, certainly teaches many things profitable for us to know and lay to heart; teaches among other things how much of the present is still held in mortmain by the past; teaches that, if there be no controlling purpose, there is, at least, a sternly logical sequence in human affairs, and that chance has but a trifling dominion over them; teaches why things are and must be so and not otherwise; teaches, perhaps, more than anything else, the value of personal character as a chief factor in what used to be called destiny, for that cause is strong which has not a multitude but one strong man behind it. History is indeed mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces home upon us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our own private affairs are to the universe in general. History is clarified experience, and yet how little do men profit by it--nay, how should we expect it of those who so seldom are taught anything by their own! Delusions, especially economical delusions, seem the only things that have any chance of an earthly immortality. I would have plenty of biography. It is no insignificant fact that eminent men have always loved their Plutarch, since example, whether for emulation or avoidance, is never so poignant as when presented to us in a striking personality. Autobiographies are also instructive reading to the student of human nature, though generally written by men who were more interesting to themselves than to their fellow-men. I have been told that Emerson and George Eliot agreed in thinking Rousseau's "Confessions" the most interesting book they had ever read.

A public library should also have many and full shelves of political economy, for the dismal science, as Carlyle called it, if it prove nothing else, will go far toward proving that theory is the bird in the bush, though she sing more sweetly than the nightingale, and that the millennium will not hasten its coming in deference to the most convincing string of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound distrust of social panaceas.

I would have a public library abundant in translations of the best books in all languages; for though no work of genius can be adequately translated, because every word of it is permeated with what Milton calls 'the precious life blood of a master spirit,' which cannot be transfused into the veins of the best translation, yet some acquaintance with foreign and ancient literatures has the liberalizing effect of foreign travel. He who travels by translation travels more hastily and superficially, but brings home something that is worth having, nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the processes of our education.

In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a wonder worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as the antithesis of science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more that her usefulness cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents. I should be thankful if an every day laborer among us could have his mind illumined, as those of Athens and of Florence had, with some image of what is best in architecture, painting and sculpture to train his crude perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us. For I hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have made our mechanics in some departments the best in the world may give us the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope.

Voyages and travels I would also have, good store, especially the earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed and men saw things invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.

To wash down the dryer morsels that every library must necessarily offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder Dumas. The world of the imagination is not the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by the sense of the beauty that _is_ in man and the earth on which he dwells. It is the realm of might be, our heaven of refuge from the shortcomings and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well,

"The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."

Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery this splendid faculty of sympathy with things that are a joy forever? For my part, I believe that the love and study of works of imagination is of practical utility in a country so profoundly material in its leading tendencies as ours. The hunger after purely intellectual delights, the content with ideal possessions, cannot but be good for us in maintaining a wholesome balance of the character and of the faculties. I for one shall never be persuaded, that Shakespeare left a less useful legacy to his countrymen than Watt. We hold all the deepest, all the highest satisfactions of life as tenants of imagination. Nature will keep up the supply of what are called hard-headed people without our help, and, if it come to that, there are other as good uses for heads as at the end of battering rams.

I know that there are many excellent people who object to the reading of novels as a waste of time, if not as otherwise harmful. But I think they are trying to outwit nature, who is sure to prove cunninger than they. Look at children. One boy shall want a chest of tools and one a book, and of those who want books one shall ask for a botany, another for a romance. They will be sure to get what they want, and we are doing a grave wrong to their morals by driving them to do things on the sly, to steal that food which their constitution craves and which is wholesome for them, instead of having it freely and frankly given them as the wisest possible diet. If we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, so neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite experiment. But we may spoil the silk for its legitimate uses. I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott's novels or Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found them very good reading at least for one young man, for one middle-aged man, and for one who is growing old. No, no; banish the Antiquary, banish Leather Stocking, and banish all the world! Let us not go about to make life duller than it is.

But I must shut the doors of my imaginary library, or I shall never end. It is left for me to say a few words of fitting acknowledgment to Mr. Fitz for his judicious and generous gift. It is always a pleasure to me that I believe the custom of giving away money during their lifetime (and there is nothing harder for most men to part with, except prejudice) is more common with Americans than with any other people. It is a still greater pleasure to see that the favorite direction of their beneficence is toward the founding of colleges and libraries. My observation has led me to believe that there is no country in which wealth is so sensible of its obligations as our own. And, as most of our rich men have risen from the ranks, may we not fairly attribute this sympathy with their kind to the benign influence of democracy rightly understood? My dear and honored friend, George William Curtis, told me that he was sitting in front of the late Mr. Ezra Cornell in a convention, where one of the speakers made a Latin quotation. Mr. Cornell leaned forward and asked for a translation of it, which Mr. Curtis gave him. Mr. Cornell thanked him, and added: "If I can help it, no young man shall grow up in New York hereafter without the chance, at least, of knowing what a Latin quotation means when he hears it." This was the germ of Cornell University, and it found food for its roots in that sympathy and thoughtfulness for others of which I just spoke. This is the healthy side of that good nature which democracy tends to foster, and which is so often harmful when it has its root in indolence or indifference; especially harmful where our public affairs are concerned, and where it is easiest, because there we are giving away what belongs to other people. In this country it is as laudably easy to procure signatures to a subscription paper as it is shamefully so to obtain them for certificates of character and recommendations to office. And is not this public spirit a natural evolution from that frame of mind in which New England was colonized, and which found expression in these grave words of Robinson and Brewster: "We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good, and of the whole." Let us never forget the deep and solemn import of these words. The problem before us is to make a whole of our many discordant parts, many foreign elements, and I know of no way in which this can better be done than by providing a common system of education and a common door of access to the best books by which that education may be continued, broadened, and made fruitful. For it is certain that, whatever we do or leave undone, those discordant parts and foreign elements are to be, whether we will or no, members of that body which Robinson and Brewster had in mind, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, for good or ill.

There is no way in which a man can build so secure and lasting a monument for himself as in a public library. Upon that he may confidently allow "Resurgam" to be carved, for through his good deed he will rise again in the grateful remembrance and in the lifted and broadened minds and fortified characters of generation after generation. The pyramids may forget their builders, but memorials such as this have longer memories.

Mr. Fitz has done his part in providing your library with a dwelling. It will be for the citizens of Chelsea to provide it with worthy habitants. So shall they, too, have a share in the noble eulogy of the ancient wise man: "The teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever."

THE INFLUENCE OF GOOD BOOKS

The following paragraphs, which are from an address delivered by Rev. Dr. Collyer at the opening of the Richard Sugden Library at Spencer, Mass., are taken from a report in _The Library Journal_ (September, 1889). The autobiographical portions, perhaps, are little related to the progress of libraries here in the United States, but their interest is so great that more of them have been included here than are strictly pertinent to our subject.

Robert Collyer was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, Eng., Dec. 8, 1823. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a boy of 14, came to Shoemakertown, Pa., with his parents in 1850 and followed there the trade of a hammermaker. Later he entered the ministry of the Unitarian church and in 1860 founded Unity church in Chicago. In 1879 he became pastor of the Church of the Messiah in New York City, where he died in 1912.

When Richard Sugden asked me to come to Spencer and say some word which would fit this occasion, I wrote him by the next mail that I should be ever so glad to come, and felt that it was a great honor to receive such an invitation, and a great pleasure. Nor was the trouble of much account--which touches us all who say Aye to such an invitation on the impulse of the moment and then wonder how we shall make our promise good. My old friend wanted me to come, and not another and better man, and to say the word which was in my heart to-day, whatever this might be; and this was enough, because I had read in the papers--what he was far too modest to tell me, beyond the merest mention--about the gift of Richard Sugden to his town, and so I said it makes no great matter what any man may say, the thing he has done tells its own story, and tells it more nobly than I could ever hope to do, more nobly and in this fashion which shames my speech. For our words float away on the summer winds, to be caught, it may be, and set in type and read by those who care for such things, and then to die and be forgotten; but this your friend and mine has done in Spencer will be eloquent with the silence which is golden, and still tell its tale when we are all dead and dust who gather here to-day. It is a poor and scant manhood which does not long now and then to be remembered some little while after the grass grows green and the daisies bloom on the grave. To have them speak of us at the fire-side and in the workshop and the market, remembering what was worthy in us and forgetting what was base, though there may be no more to tell by comparison than Dr. Ripley told down in Concord, as he stood by the dust of a man in his own town, and being sorely troubled to find some real worth in the man's life he could dwell on for a moment, said, "He was the best man I ever knew at a fire." I cannot even guess whether Richard Sugden ever thought of this as one of the rewards which must return to him for his gift to Spencer, and I love to think that to his generous heart the work was its own reward. But I say, as we stand here on this day of gift and dedication, that if this had been his sole purpose, to be held in grateful remembrance of his fellow-townsmen and their children through centuries of time, then he has taken out an insurance that will stand good always and keep his memory green in the town of Spencer. And not here alone, but far away across the sea in old Yorkshire, where his home was in the old time before he came to this new world to seek his fortune, and, far more and better than that, to earn it honestly and well. The story will be told there long after to-day and to-morrow, how one of the Sugdens who went out from among them gave this gift, and then the kith and kin will hold up their heads and feel that the fine old name has won still another patent of nobility. A poor youth he was in the narrow, contracted, dear old land, where the poor were held by a cruel bit. And a voice came to him, saying, "Get thee out from thy kindred and thy father's house unto a land that I will tell thee of"; and he followed the voice, as I did also, to the promised land; carved out his fortune honest and fair, I say, but then could not be content to enrich his own family alone, or, as so many do, to remember his town in his will. He must build this noble structure, please God, in his own lifetime, and convey it by free gift to you and yours forever; and so the work is done, and so well done, to all seeming, that if you care for the gift as your friend has cared for its creation, we may say, as old Andrew Fairservice said of the cathedral in Glasgow, "Keep airn and gunpooder aff it, and it will stand to the crack o'doom."

My friend and yours is also an Englishman and a Yorkshireman, as you know, by birth and breeding, as I am also, and I am the more glad and proud of what he has done for that reason; because I still love old England with a very tender love after these forty years of absence, as I know he does also. But I have had to notice how very many of us who came here from England to find a home in the American republic, and it may be make their fortune, can find nothing so good in this new world as that they left behind them, and no matter how much wealth they may win, they do nothing as a rule for the town they live in, like this your friend has done in Spencer. He could not be content to be a mere exile from England, he must be a citizen of the United States and blend his life with the life in this new world which has made him so much more of a man than he ever could have been had he stayed on that hill-side in old Yorkshire. This is the true home of his heart and life, here he won his wealth and found ample room to grow to be the man you honor, and here is one proof among many he has given in all these years, that while he was born in England and is proud of it, though he may not say so, he was born again in America, and does not love the old land less but the new land more, as every man must who comes here to share your life, if he is worth his salt.

You will pardon me, I know, as you receive the gift, for this word in praise of the giver, while he may find it hard to do so; but for that I do not care, because in asking me to come here and say the word that was in my heart he must run his risk and take it as it came to me, and insisted on being said. Richard Sugden falls into line with our home-born men far and wide, but especially in Massachusetts, who have done or are ready to do some such thing as he has done now in Spencer--building these public libraries in the towns where they live or from which they went away to seek their fortune; public libraries, which range with the schools and churches and the town halls; which are the four-square defence of our life as citizens of the republic and of our intelligence and virtue, when they are nobly maintained. They can do no nobler thing. They are sure of their reward, also, if they want one, in the grateful remembrance of their towns and cities, and open the way for others again who wonder what they can do to the finest purpose; men who have made their fortune and have not been struck by what we may call the greenback paralysis, through which the hand that gets takes all the strength from the hand that gives. What can we do better, they will say in such a case, than this Richard Sugden has done for Spencer, and many another man far and wide?--see to it that our town also shall have a public library, which shall be its pride and joy, and make perfect so far as we can the defence from ignorance and vice and crime; open a fountain from which the waters of life may flow forever for those who thirst for knowledge or whatever good books can give them? And, as I have had to notice up among the mountains this summer how I would not feel thirsty till I came to a clear, cool spring, but then would drink to my heart's content, so such fountains as these will also create the thirst they can so nobly allay, while still we keep on drinking in answer to their perpetual invitation, as the years come and go.

And now shall I tell you a very simple story touching my own life, which will help to make good my thought of the worth of this you are doing in Spencer through your free public library, and have been doing, as I understand, these 30 years, which is in itself a great and singular honor to your town, maintaining a free library and reading-room at your own proper charges, for which your friend and fellow-citizen has built this noble edifice, with some such feeling as he had in the old time who built the temple that the ark of the covenant and the rod which budded and the sacred books might have an abiding and splendid home. It was my lot to be born as your friend was and mine, in a poor and small home, with this thirst in my nature, as far back as I can remember, for something to read. And I mind very well the first book I ever bought with my own penny, the delectable history of Whittington and his Cat, which cast such a spell over my imagination that when I went up Highgate Hill over London the other summer, and saw the stone on which poor Dick sat down to hear the bells ringing far below, which lured him back again to fame and fortune, I found I was a small boy again reading my small wonder-book, and the old stone divided the honors of a tender interest with the red granite shaft set above the grave of the woman of finest genius England has to her name, George Eliot, which is a few minutes' walk away.

There were a few books in our small cottage of three rooms, but these were among the best in the English tongue, the Bible and Bunyan and Goldsmith, with a few more I do not now remember, but these I read as you drink at clear, cool springs. Then a man came along from over the moors and brought Burns with him, and another brought Shakespeare. My father borrowed these for me to read, and the world grew great and wide and wonderful to me as I read them, while to this day I notice that I care more for the history of England in Shakespeare's grand dramas than I do for Hume and Froude and Macaulay, so great was the spell cast again over my life. Then an old farmer came along with a couple of volumes, and said, "Here, lad, I notice thou is fond o' good reading, and I think thou will like to read these books." It was Irving's Sketch-Book and it was Christmas day, and I was away from home then and lonesome, wanting to be with my folks and to sit by the old fireside, but the magic wand of Irving touched me and stole away all my tears. Still, as you may see, this was only hand-to-mouth reading. I had never seen a public library, but had heard of them and longed to find one somewhere, sometime, as, I fear, I never had longed to find my way into heaven. Well, I heard of one that had been started only three miles away, and so I went with my heart in my mouth to see what I could find to read in the wonderful new library. I can see the books now standing on the shelves in the small upper room, and recall the old delight of my youth. I go into the Astor Library now and then when I have time, rich in the lore of all the ages, and have wandered through some of the finest in the world beside, but that small room in Addingham is still the story of one's first love. There were some 200 volumes, but here I was with all this wealth of books at my command at about the cost of three days' work in a year. I cannot tell you the story of that first grand passion and the delight of it. I had found a library. I like that honest Dutchman, a fine old scholar says, who told me that one page of Plato did him more good than ten bumpers of wine, and that was the way I felt about those 200 volumes. I had found out the unspeakable delight of drinking all my heart could desire, and struck the matchless intoxication of noble and wholesome books, that leave no headache or heartache when you are sober, only it was a good while before I got sober.

Then I came in due time to this new world and began to work again at the anvil in Pennsylvania, my own proper business I expected to follow all my life, and presently heard of a library in the small town of Hatboro, six or seven miles away, six one way and seven the other. A fine old farmer had found a long while ago that this was the noblest use he could make of a good deal of his money, to build up a library away among the rich green lands, and so there it was waiting for me with its treasure of good books. I see them again as they stand on the shelves, and think I could walk right in and lay my hands on those that won me most potently and cast their spell again over my heart, though it is five and thirty years since I was within the doors. I may mention Hawthorne among them all as the author I found there for the first time who won my heart for good and all, as we may say, and holds it still. Then I found a great treasure in no long time in Philadelphia, that I could no more exhaust than you can exhaust the spring we have been glancing at by drinking, which dips down toward the deepness of the world. I was still bound fast to the anvil, for this was our living, but there was my life, so far as good books could make it, rich for me and noble in the great library again seven miles away. So what matter about the hard day's work at the anvil, while there was some new volume to read when the day's work was done or old one to read with an ever new delight. My new book or old one, with the sweet green lane in the summer time where I could walk while the birds sang their mating song, and the fragrance of the green things growing floated on the soft summer air, and the fireside in winter with the good wife busy about the room, and the little ones sleeping in their cribs, I look back to those times still and wonder whether they were not the best I ever knew. I was reading some lines the other day in an old English ballad written 300 years ago, and they told the story of those times:

"O for a booke, and a shadie nook, eyther indoore, or out, With the green leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the streete cries all about, Where I maie reade, all at my ease, both of the New and Olde, For a right good Booke, whereon to looke, was better to me than Golde."

And so I touch the story of my own life for some poor evidence of what good books can do for us and for the worth of what you have been doing in Spencer all these years, and are made glad to day by this library building which crowns the good endeavor; a place that will not shame but will glorify your purpose and hold it to the noblest and best endeavors you can make in the time to come, for such a shrine will be sure to draw books to it always, worthy of its beauty and grace, and there will be other men and women also to follow in the steps of Richard Sugden, and bring to it costly works and rare and beautiful, worthy to be in the palaces of kings while still you will see to it that the noble provision of books for the general reading rests directly as it has done so long on your own generous care.

You have made this noble boon of good books easy and opulent for the workingmen of Spencer. When I came to this new world and had not heard as yet of that library among the green lands, but must have books on any terms, and the terms were hard, and the good wife watching not the dollars but the very cents because they must all be saved to furnish the little home, I can well remember how I bought a book one day for half a dollar, far too big to smuggle into the cottage, and hid it in the bushes, watched my chances the next day, and got it in all safe and sound; and some days after, when she caught me reading, and said, "Where did you get that book, my dear?" I answered, "Why, I have had it for some time"; and then she only said, "Indeed!" for she was patient with me and good; and then, it was in what somebody calls our treacle moon. The workingmen of Spencer fall on happy times. Here are books easy to come at as the water you drink and the air you breathe and stores of them which can never be exhausted. If it had come to pass thirty years ago that some man delving in your wild hills had struck gold, and all the eager manhood of New England had gone crazy to delve for gold where Spencer stands, and had found it in mighty stores, I wonder whether that would have been such a boon to Spencer and the world as this you have done--establishing great industries and wholesome and good; beckoning the working forces from far and wide to come here and take hold with you on such terms as we can find nowhere else outside this new world. Brother McGlynn, I remember, as we rode together to the funeral of Gen. Grant, called out some half-dozen times, "God's world for the workingman!" You did this who were the pioneers of the strong and steadfast town, and then you said, We must have a free public library, and pay the bills; we have got our churches started, and our schools, and our place for town-meeting--the tap-root of the tree of liberty in New England, a living tree, and no mere liberty-pole, and reaching down 200 years--now we must complete the walls of the city, which standeth four-square, by a free public library, and so do what men may to maintain a fair public virtue and intelligence within the lines of Spencer; these men we employ shall have books to read of every kind any man ought to read, and the ought shall be large and free and fair; and so the thing was done.

The thirty years have come and gone; the free public library has done its noble and beautiful work. It is a new departure we touch to-day in this ceremony of gift and acceptance. This library will grow always more worthy the name your friend and neighbor has made for it from this time. They say that in Scotland once a man sent for his minister and said, "If I give L20,000 to the church do you think it will be reckoned in my account when I get through down here?" And the minister said: "I do not feel sure about that; but it is weel worth the experiment." I do feel sure about this, and the worth of what you can do, to be placed to your credit, not yonder but right here in the town of Spencer. There can be no nobler investment, and but few as noble as this you have made these thirty years for all who have the hunger and thirst in them good books can satisfy; while still with poor Oliver in the story, we ask for more; and they are not dead things, as Milton says, but contain a potency of life as active as the soul from which they sprang:

"Books are each a world; and those we know Are a substantial world both pure and good; Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow. And books are yours Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which for a day of need The Sultans hide deep in ancestral vaults. These stores of truth you can unlock at will."

BOOKS AND LIFE

The influence of books on the community has been used in this address by Dean (now President) Birge as a basis for discussing their reaction on special groups, especially those differentiated by age and sex, and how far the library should be guided by it and take advantage of it. It is perhaps the best general treatment of the group features of socialized library work by a speaker of authority, not a professional librarian.

Edward Asahel Birge was born at Troy, N.Y., Sept. 7, 1851, graduated at Williams in 1873 and since 1875 has been a member of the University of Wisconsin faculty, serving successively as instructor in natural history, professor of zoology, dean of the college of arts and sciences, acting president, and finally in 1919, president of the University. He has also served as a director of the Free Library at Madison, and in 1906 was president of the Wisconsin Library Association, before whom this address was delivered.

The aspect of the subject to which I would call your attention is the often observed fact of the extent to which modern life in all of its phases, is becoming based upon books. I say in all of its phases, for we are concerned with the present extent of this relation between books and life with its rapid increase, rather than with its existence. Ever since the beginning of human society men have based their actions on the teachings of experience. Part of these teachings each individual has directly derived from his environment, and he has supplemented and enlarged them by means of those coming from the remembered experience of others, often belonging to an older generation. Later in history there were added those teachings derived from books--from the recorded experience of others. With that enlargement of the basis of human action which comes from the remembered experience of others we, as librarians, have nothing to do, and, indeed, there is little to say about it now which could not have been said with equal propriety, one, two, or twenty centuries ago. With books the case is different. The last century, the last generation, the last decade--each has seen the transfer of the basis of action from the oral to the printed word, which could be paralleled by no other period of equal length in the history of civilization. The story of this transfer from talk to print, from rule of thumb to textbook, from tradition to school, from practise to science, is long and intensely interesting. I can touch only a few phases of it.

First consider the lengthening of the school period for children. I do not think it is possible accurately to compare the present length of this period with that which existed a century or a half ago; nor would such a comparison interest us. It is enough for our purpose to know that years have been added to the school life of many thousands of the youth of all classes. As a single illustration, consider the effect of the high school, whose development into a large and popular institution, an institution affecting great masses of the people, belongs almost wholly to the period within the life of the generation now on the stage. A half century ago the public high school was almost unknown and the private academy reached very few persons. Only a generation ago the number of students in secondary schools was hardly one-tenth of the present number. The attendance on institutions of secondary grade has thus increased five times as rapidly as the population. Within the past fifteen years the attendance in the high schools of Milwaukee has more than trebled, while only a little more than fifty per cent. has been added to the population of the city. In Racine almost exactly the same ratio holds, and so for many other cities of the United States, the increase being least marked in New England cities, and greatest in the cities of the West.

The formative influence of the high school youth are far more extensively and exclusively books than were those of his father or grandfather, who probably began to learn his trade, or his business, at about the age when his boy enters the high school, and who therefore, during the period of adolescence, received his training from action rather than from study, from oral rather than from printed experience.

One may find to-day in the writings of many teachers jeremiads over the shortness of the average school life of children. I would not contradict their statistics and would join in their regrets, but the fact remains that the most striking phenomenon in the life of the children of the past thirty years is the extent to which their training has been committed to the use of books and the rapid growth of the use of books as the period has advanced. Few as the school years of the children now are, those of any older generation have been fewer. This aspect of the matter is the one that is of interest to us, and the school life of the present, instead of arousing our regrets by its brevity, may well call out our astonishment by its length, and demand the use of our best wits to see the changes which have been caused in the life of the present and to forecast those which in the future will flow from this fundamental change in education.

One of these correlated changes is already apparent--the extension of the period of book learning for many thousands of persons into the college and university course.

In 1850 the total attendance on colleges in the United States was about ten thousand. Half a century later, when the population of the country had increased about three and one-third times, the college students had increased in a tenfold ratio, or more than three times as rapidly as the population. Even more significant is the growth of the number of college students in more recent years. Since 1889 the number has more than doubled, thus continuing in the latest years a ratio of growth with reference to population quite as great as in earlier years.

An equally significant, and quite as conspicuous change, is seen in the growth of technical education. Thirty years ago, when I came to Wisconsin, the university was graduating from two or three and a half dozen engineers yearly, and these could not all find occupation in this commonwealth, with a population then of more than a million people. Now a hundred graduates go out at Commencement, while the population of the state has little more than doubled, and while other engineering schools of high rank have multiplied all around it.

Nowadays the man of books, rather than the man of tradition is directing the work of the world. In the copper mines of the north the old-fashioned mine captain, who received his profession and his traditions from his father, is disappearing and has almost vanished. His place is taken by the graduate of a mining school, who interprets what he sees, not by the light of the experience of his elders, communicated to him orally, but by the far clearer light of the collective experience of men embodied in books.

When the capitalist now desires to explore for new iron mines he employs not the old-fashioned prospector, but puts into the field a party of young men often fresh from the geological laboratory. Thus science, organized knowledge, book learning, is driving out with increasing rapidity the picturesque figures of past times--times wholly past, though only just behind us in years. That "bookish theoric," so detested by Iago, is apparently firmly in control of affairs and has displaced its predecessors and rivals.

In countless other ways the same fact is shown. Half a century ago a youth who desired to become a lawyer or a doctor entered the office of a practitioner and learned his profession by practise and experience. Now he goes to the school of law or medicine and gains his entrance to his chosen calling by the way of books and laboratories. Even commerce and trade, in which the rules of practical experience seem most firmly entrenched, are shifting their basis to books, and schools of commerce and trade schools are springing up on every hand to give youth a broader foundation of knowledge than can be gained from practise. Still more significant are the facts shown by the enormous development of agricultural experiment stations, farmers' bulletins and farmers' institutes. Agriculture, that calling which of all others is most ancient and most conservative, is rapidly changing its basis from tradition to books. Perhaps I ought not to say "most conservative," for there is one calling which may better deserve the title--that of the domestic industries practised by women. Yet even here a beginning of the transfer, although a small one, has been made by schools of domestic science.

While this beginning is but small, and while the traditional professions of women have not yet been greatly modified by books, the life of no class of the community has been more profoundly affected by this general change than has that of women. With the passing away of home industries and with the great increase of wealth which the past century, or half century, has seen, have come vastly increased opportunities to women for leisure, for release from domestic duties, and for the prolongation of school life. The statistics of high schools and colleges sufficiently show the use which they are making of this leisure. Other facts are equally obvious and significant as showing the transfer of the basis of woman's life from domestic experience to books. The woman's club, I suppose, may be said fairly to take the place of the sewing circle of our mothers and grandmothers. The contrast even in the name is significant, as marking the transfer of interest from the circle of domestic experience to the wider domain of the recorded life of the world, to the realm of books.

Thus at whatever point we examine the life of the present, we find it basing itself on books, both for action and enjoyment, and that in an ever-increasing degree. This truth is peculiarly evident to you as librarians, since the facts of your own profession and the rapid growth of libraries and library work afford one of the latest phases of this general movement.

From 1875 to 1896 the number of libraries in the United States just about doubled, increasing steadily, and adding, during this period, about 2,000 libraries, or a little less than 100 per year. From 1896 to 1900, 1,350 libraries were added, or about 450 per year. From 1900 to 1903, 1,500 libraries were founded, or 500 per year. In the past ten years the number of libraries must have doubled; a ratio growth at least four times that of the population....

It is plain that the adjustment of the library to this movement of men's minds towards books is the most important practical question for all of us. Questions of management, of administration, of methods are all of secondary importance beside this one--if, indeed they may be called even secondary. For this change of base is a revolutionary affair, not a mere matter of readjustment of detail, and it is no easy task for the library to find itself in such a movement. Libraries are so small a part of the national intellectual life, so small, in the mass, for example, in comparison to the great universities, that their proper influence and work are easily overlooked. There is sometimes danger that they may be swept into currents guided by other forces rather than find opportunity freely to contribute their own share to the movement.

Let us turn then to the more practical side of the question, and ask how the library is adjusting itself, in this changed relation of men, where it has best succeeded, and where it still has most to do. Let us ask where experience seems to promise successful solution of problems, and where the problems are in that stage in which only doubtful success can be expected from experiments, and final solution still lies far before us.

The library began as a place to keep books, permitting their use by the public, but often under such restrictions as seem to indicate that this service was granted "grudgingly and of necessity." Books and the high life were in some obscure way correlated in the mind of the librarian, and he too often seemed to feel that these were treasures not to be shared by the many. The first change which came, therefore, as the library was swept into the general intellectual current of time, was the removal of restrictions on the use of books and their replacement by devices intended to encourage and extend that use. A second step, and a much more revolutionary one, has been to teach the community directly the uses of books, and thus not merely to afford easy conditions for the use of books on the part of those who want them, but to add a positive force which will compel the books to go out in the community, there to perform their present service and to create a demand for an increased service in the future.

This change marks a fundamental departure of the library from its old basis, and one which will affect it greatly, for good and perhaps for ill. The movement toward freedom of administration was really concerned with small matters, and left unaltered the central plan and purpose of the library. But with the assumption of direct educational work for children, for women, for men, the library has entered upon a new epoch in its evolution. It has taken up duties whose performance will demand greatly enlarged resources--of space and of money, of books and of working staff. And what is of even greater importance, the purpose, the point of view, of those who control the library, and the temper of the administration, will change, and ought to change, under the pressure of these new duties.

This positive and educational library work falls into two main types--that for children, and that for adults--both men and women. It is still in a tentative condition, in a formative and experimental period. The results are still so few and recent that they do not admit any exact formulation. They permit only general and suggestive statement.

Work for children is, in some ways, the easiest educational attempt of the library, since it runs parallel to the work of the schools, and those for whom the work is done are easily reached and easily guided. Its function is, of course, in part to supplement the school. It would be, however, a great misfortune if it were looked upon merely as a supplement to the school, as a means of providing reading which the school ought to buy, but cannot afford. Its purpose is rather to begin in childhood, both for pleasure and for profit, a voluntary association with books which lie wholly outside of the school program. It aims to begin the early formation of the habit of reading as distinguished from study--a habit which will be permanent, instead of ending with the period of formal instruction. It recognizes the fact that school life must soon end, and that when the end comes, the important feature of the child's intellectual condition is not so much the amount he has learned as the temper and habit of his mind toward books. Has he merely learned certain truths from books or are books open to him? It is of fundamental importance to the community that the second alternative be secured. The school libraries and children's librarians are, therefore, not to feel that their duty is to supplement the school. That duty lies on a different, and, in a way, a higher plane, in a more spiritual region. It is their part to make the child a citizen of the world of books, and to naturalize him so thoroughly that he will always remain a citizen. Thus only can he share fully, not only in the high and permanent pleasures that books afford, but also in that great movement of life toward books which marks our time.

From remarks which I have heard on various occasions, I believe this extension of library service and library duties to youth has often been misunderstood. Work with school children, whether done by the library force as part of their duties, or by assistants especially engaged, has seemed to many to be a somewhat unnecessary extension of the library--something of a luxury. These added duties have often been assumed by the libraries under special pleas, and for reasons temporary in character. But in that wider view which I am trying to present, the truth is recognized that the library is a permanent storehouse of books for the community, to which the citizen of every class and age must repair for knowledge not only interesting and useful but necessary to the conduct of life. We recognize also that while the training of the schools soon ceases for every individual, the service of the library extends throughout life. We assert also that the possibilities of this service must be taught to the members of the community from childhood, and that the efficiency of the books will largely depend on the efficiency with which this teaching is done.

Especial care must be taken with children and youth toward the end of the ordinary school periods--in the upper grades and in the high school. Here it is that the transition to independent reading must come. The children's room must not be merely an appendage to the kindergarten and primary school, but the library must supply to youth of all ages not only books, but inspiration in reading. The questions which arise in work for children are many and often perplexing, but if these general principles are accepted, they are, after all, questions of detail rather than of principle.

The library's influence over women has been the greatest in extent and productive of the largest results; so much so that, in the opinion of many critics of the public library, that institution is in danger of becoming "feminized." I shall not attempt to discuss so large a subject as that indicated by this fearful word, but it may not be unprofitable to touch upon the causes which have given the work of the library for women at once so great an extension and so great a success, as well as some obvious limitations. I should place first among the causes, both for the success and the limitation of this influence, the recent acquisition by women of large opportunities for the intellectual life, their natural conservatism, and their greatly increased leisure as compared with men. That women read books, and read them in enormous numbers, is granted, indeed asserted. That they read seriously I have heard questioned and have always wondered at the doubt. It seems to me rather that they never read in any way except seriously. How many women--reading women, I mean--can put away an unfinished book without a sense of guilt? How many can "browse about" in a library and enjoy doing so? How many really like to read a dictionary or encyclopaedia without ulterior designs upon an article for the women's club, or, at least, without wanting to know something? These are all tests--unconscious, but none the less excellent--of the real readers, of those to whom books are alive and intimate friends. While I have no statistics at hand, I fear that many women most devoted to libraries would fail to reach this standard. The field of the intellectual life has been widely opened to women so recently that they still feel a certain sense of duty along with the privilege which is granted them in entering it, rather than a complete sense of being at home there. The conservatism of women helps this tendency to read seriously and for general purposes. The traditional use of books as a means of culture appeals to their more conservative mind as it does not to men. They are more easily induced to read for reading's sake--they are willing to read the books one ought to read. They are moved by considerations of mental improvement independent of any result beyond the improvement itself. The library as a library attracts them. Then, too, the amount of their reading and its character is modified by the fact that women are so much more limited than men in means to pass their leisure. Jerome K. Jerome (if correctly reported by newspapers) recently pointed out that much so-called reading is no more an intellectual process than is smoking a cigar, and that often we go to books just as to the cigar, to pass the time and to prevent the intrusion of disagreeable thoughts. Of course this is, and ought to be, wholly true, and since with us the cigar is a masculine privilege, the woman must take to books as the man takes to smoking, and even to drinking. Speaking seriously, the library is to many women a relief from care--the only distraction from the monotony of routine. It is a cheap and easy thing to sneer at this use of books, but we who believe in the friendship of books know that here lies one of the greatest blessings they can give, as it is one of the greatest blessings of true friendship. Nor do we wonder that the uncultivated, or the half-cultivated, often choose their book friends from a class not greatly above their own.

On the other hand, women have hardly begun to use books on lines along which we are seeking to get men to read--in directions connected with their trade or profession. Domestic industries, so far as they are in the hands of women, are still most wholly dependent upon tradition. They are not exposed to competition. Failure or inefficiency does not put the proprietor out of business. Their results are not measured in dollars and cents. In a word, the whole line of motives which is forcing masculine industries over to the basis of books is lacking in the chief feminine occupations. We are now seeing only the feeble beginnings of the attempt thus to transfer them from tradition to science. A long time must pass, and social conditions greatly change, before the transfer is made. Thus women are not forced from general to special lines of reading, while they have greater motive for general reading than have men.

As a result, women are becoming, to a degree without example in the past, the possessors and transmitters of the life of culture. I do not believe that fewer men read good literature than formerly, but the increase in masculine readers of this type has been so much less than the increase in women readers that in comparison the number of men seems to have shrunken greatly. Of course much of this reading by women for culture is desultory and aimless, much is misdirected. But after all deductions are made, it remains true that the knowledge of books seems to be tending to become the possession of women rather than of men. It has always belonged to a certain class of men--not a very large part of the community--and it is still theirs; but its extension to other classes has been along female lines rather than male, and its transmission to the next generation seems only too likely to depend in a large measure upon the female line. College statistics at present show the same facts. Language, literature, and art are the chosen studies of women. Men turn rather to science, economics, or politics--subjects which, they suppose, bear directly on future plans for life. These great subjects whose main purpose in education is the uplifting of the mind, the widening of the mental horizon without direct reference to any specific line of life--these appeal far more strongly to women than to men, and their influence, in a rapidly increasing degree, will reach the next generation through the mother rather than through the father. It would be a pessimistic view which would say that modern society is coming to depend on the mothers for the accumulation and transmission of culture, while retaining in the male line the function of accumulating and transmitting wealth, though much could be said for the thesis and a very plausible argument could be constructed for it.

If all this is true, it is inevitable that women should use libraries far more than men. It is equally inevitable that in this large use much should be trivial, much customary, much misdirected and unwise. Nature has no means of reaching success except by the rule of natural selection--the old-fashioned plan of "cut-and-try," and this means much failure along the road of advance. We who see the work of the library from our daily experience know how much it is contributing of culture, how much of happiness, to the life of women, and through them to that of the community.

But men--why do they not use the library, say the critics, and what shall the library do to increase its use by men? You have all read the vigorous article that the _Independent_ published on this subject last summer, which, with much of error, contains a good deal of truth in a stimulating form. It presents a subject which must have a somewhat larger treatment.

It ought first to be said that in this and other articles on the topic the terms _women_ and _men_ are by no means similarly used. The writers are not concerned about men at large--the husbands and brothers of the women who are said to visit the library--the women of comparative leisure, who are seeking information on art, literature, or ancestry, who are trying to get up a paper for the club, or who visit the library for recreation. It is the plumber, the machinist, the grocer, whose absence they deplore, and to whom they think the library ought to give help. Not only so, but it is the plumber, rather than as a man, whose presence is desired and who is to be aided. The library, says the _Independent_ in effect, ought to teach the plumber how to "plumb"; ought to furnish him with information which his boss is unable to give. But this is a new function for libraries, however useful it may be, and a function which libraries do not attempt for women. Dressmakers do not (I speak under correction, but I think I am right) expect to secure at a library a knowledge of how to fit a difficult customer, any more than do tailors. Yet this sort of thing, we are told, the library ought to do for men; and we are told in a tone which implies that here is an obvious duty which only wilful ignorance can overlook.

It ought rather to be recognized that in undertaking this work the public library is entering a new and almost unexplored field of effort, and also that it is trying to extend its influence to classes of the community which it has not hitherto reached, and along lines of knowledge which it has never seriously attempted to follow. In such a work there must be many experiments and many failures, and the positive results will be small for a long time....

The problem for the library, as regards men, is therefore twofold: 1. Can men be induced to visit the library for general purposes, to use it in ways similar to those for which women come to it? 2. How can the wage-earners and handicraftsmen be induced to visit the library and use its books for their practical advantage?

Let us first consider the general question: Can we reach the men? The women come to the libraries, say the critics, in shoals and droves, for all sorts of intellectual purposes, good and bad. You catch the children, they say, in school, when they cannot get away, and indeed are glad of relief from lessons; but the men--can you reach them and affect their lives? In reply we must say at once and frankly that no such large volume of success with men is possible as has been the case with women. The public library came to women at the precise moment when increased education disposed them to use it, and increased leisure gave them the opportunity. It fills a space in their lives which would be otherwise void. But the present time is one of decreased leisure and increased intensity of work for all classes of men. Perhaps I ought to except from this statement the wage-earner, who as eight hour laws and customs come into force will have more time for reading than the man of almost any other class in the community. This movement toward lessened hours of labor is more effective where libraries are best organized and therefore presents an opportunity for the extension of library influence, both general and special. The opportunity must be improved, yet neither the wage-earner nor the business man will be easy to reach; neither has been among the active patrons of the library in the past. Their lives are already full, both with business and pleasure, and if the library is to reach them, it must attract them on lines which appeal to them more strongly than business or present pleasure. It must reach needs which they know and feel to be real.

I do not believe that men of the present generation will come to libraries in great numbers for the purposes that attract women. We might as well admit that they will not substitute the novel for the cigar, the printed story for the companionship of the club. They will not read good books because they ought to do so, and the number who will read them because they like to do so is unfortunately not great. Men have not thus acted since the world began, and man-like, they will not do so now, even though such conduct on their part would help our library statistics very greatly. Nor will any great number of them read in order to enlarge the basis of life, for, in spite of the greatness of the movement toward books, it affects at first hand only a few people in the community. The mass of workmen, now and always, will get their knowledge from tradition or at second hand. It will be the unusual man who will get his ideas from books at first hand and thus improve his work and that of his fellows.

The problem is then to reach these few, and through them the community; and this brings us to the second phase of the question. I do not find that the problem has been solved; perhaps it is too recent. But libraries have been attempting its solution by various methods and with varying success.

The first and most successful attempt is that of the large libraries, like that of Pittsburgh and the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, which maintain a technical library for the men--a library adequately housed in its own rooms and administered by a special librarian. These technical libraries for working men succeed in their aim of reaching many of the class for which they are established. They offer not merely an opportunity for reading, but that guidance in the use of books which all classes of the community need, if they are to use books for a serious purpose. They show us that success in this line of effort may be reached if the library has an income sufficient to enable it to undertake the task on a large scale.

This condition is, however, not that of most of the libraries which are represented here. Our incomes are none too large for the work which we must necessarily do for the general public. Such libraries must ordinarily content themselves with offering to men opportunities for reading without special guidance in the use of books. This work has been attempted in a good many of the smaller libraries. They attempt to provide masculine conditions for reading and reading material which will appeal to men. The first includes a well-furnished, comfortable room for men, where a man can come in his working clothes without feeling he is out of place; smoking may be allowed or not--both plans are tried without great difference in apparent result. The masculine reading comprises newspapers and magazines; good books of literature which can be left in the room (paper bound copies suggested); most important of all are trade journals; if possible, files of the recent volumes of these journals, selected according to the industries of each town; and the most readable and most recent reference books on similar subjects. In a word, a room is furnished with reading which will appeal to the classes of men who do not ordinarily use libraries and who are not greatly interested in literature.

This plan is good one and ought to be tried, but I believe the conditions are exceptional under which it will reach large numbers of men. Inertia and habit will keep most of them away from the library. They will see the daily papers at their wonted places of resort, and the room, necessarily lacking in much of the freedom of the club, will fail to attract very many of them. They will not form the habit of visiting it, even though they might enjoy it if the habit were formed. It must also be remembered that increasing numbers of the manufacturing concerns are providing their employees with reading of this kind, and thus limiting the use of the city library.

In some libraries the attempt to reach men has gone still further and has led to an inclusion of attractions which are ordinarily regarded as outside the work of a library. They have attempted to combine to some degree the privileges of a club with that of the public library. The Stevens Point Library has a club room, equipped with billiard tables, cards, etc., as well as with technical journals and similar books. This, the librarian reports, is very successful in attracting boys, many of whom learn to use the library. Men, however, do not come in large numbers, as they do not care to use a place frequented by boys, and in which smoking is not permitted. At Wausaukee a special room with games and where lunch is served has been established at the library as a means of furnishing a sort of club room for lumber men who come to the village, especially on Sunday, and who have no other place of resort, except the saloon. How far such methods are advisable as a part of library work is a question which will often be asked during the coming years and which only experience can answer. At present such enterprises have not gone beyond the stage of early experiment.

Summing up the result, I would frankly confess that the reports which I have received are not numerous enough for a positive judgment, yet it is my impression that where there is an income large enough to provide a special librarian and a public large enough to warrant the expense, this movement for special libraries for men is likely to succeed. It seems also to be true that where the library provides the men with the opportunity for reading only, and does not furnish guidance for readers, no very large use is made of technical books and there is no greatly increased use of the library in general. How to guide the reading seems, therefore, to be the central factor in the solution of the problem.

In a small town a special librarian is impossible, for financial reasons, but there, as well as in large cities, lectures can be given which deal with practical subjects and the aid to their knowledge which the library affords. Many cities are giving such courses of lectures, notably perhaps New York, and with considerable effect on the use of the public library. I have no statistics regarding such lectures from the various cities, but undoubtedly this method offers the easiest plan for extending the use of the library in smaller cities and towns. I say the _easiest_, and it will not be difficult to secure good lectures on literature, history, or art, but lectures on the practical subjects are much more difficult to obtain, since it is hard to secure lecturers who know more about the trades than do the craftsmen who constitute the audience.

If these movements are to succeed, they must not be attempted in an amateurish way. They must be well planned and well executed--planned and executed with careful reference to the wants of the men of the community. Above all, they must be persistently carried out with full vigor year after year, even though results are apparently small. Their purpose must be steadfastly maintained and the methods of execution continually readjusted, as success or failure indicates. It is no light or easy thing to change the habits of half the adult members of the community--to cultivate the reading habit in those who have reached maturity without acquiring it--and the work which the library proposes for itself involves such a task.

If men are to be reached at all it must be on a business basis, not on that of occasional effort. Nor must the missionary spirit prevail, for men, as a rule, do not wish to be reformed or to be helped. They must find in the library a place which appeals to their sense of comfort and which gives them things that they want, or, like other sensible people, they will not use it.

One word in closing this topic, and that in emphasis of what I have already said. It is easier to keep a boy reading as he grows up than to catch him again as a man after the library has lost him. Take a lesson from the church. The boy who graduates from Sunday-school rarely returns for a post-graduate course. In the wise administration of the work for children and youth lies the main hope not of reaching, but keeping men in the library.

But it should be definitely understood that this enlargement of library work which the times are forcing upon us means increasing expense, more room, more books--which must be more frequently renewed--and a larger library staff. It means the attempt to do efficiently several lines of intellectual work for the public instead of purveying literature for those who desire it. This new work the library can readily accomplish, but not with the staff which was sufficient for the old duties. Any library can provide, for example, the list of desiderata mentioned in the _Independent's_ article, which could easily be extended. They can all be furnished by the library as the public wants them and will pay for them. They cannot be, and ought not to be, supplied by an already overworked library staff of two or three persons.

The library, therefore, should not enter upon these duties blindly or ignorantly. It is a great task which is thus undertaken--to educate the community to use books and to guide it in that use. Although small beginnings are possible, the work will inevitably grow on our hands just as that of the schools and colleges has done, and for similar reasons. But whatever difficulties lie in the way of their performance, it is plain that the library must assume these new duties. With many experiments, with many failures, with many partial successes, the library will extend its teachings, its conscious influences, until they touch the life of the community at every point.

In this rambling talk I have discussed library work as it looks forward to new problems, and have devoted only a word, and that perhaps a rather disparaging one, to the traditional use of the library. I would not leave the subject in this way. For the traditional use of books remains and will remain the center of library work and the main source of its best influences. The problem of the library to-day, looked at from within and not from without, and in relation to other agencies, is essentially that which confronts the university. Both institutions once stood for culture and for culture exclusively. Both are now challenged by the spirit of the newer time and are called upon to justify themselves as public utilities. This they must do, and that in full measure, but there is a real danger that both, in the multiplicity of the new duties thus forced upon them, may forget the weighty words, "these ought ye to do and not leave the other undone." For, after all, the highest public utility which the library offers, or can offer, is the opportunity to cultivate the friendship of books. This utility is none the less precious because it is intangible. Indeed, it is the unique privilege of the library among municipal enterprises that it can provide a service which aids the higher life of the citizen so directly and so purely. In the spirituality of this function, the library stands second only to the highest institutions of pure learning, and to the church.

No new undertaking, no extension of work, no plea of necessity can warrant or justify any loss of power on this highest level. The problem is not to discover how to sacrifice as little as possible of the old spirit to the new duties, but to learn how through the new duties we may make more wide-spread and more potent for good that oldest and best inheritance from the past--the love of books.

"The people's university," the library has been called, but it would be as great a pity if the librarian so understood this term as to believe that people came to the library only to learn, as it would be if any went there who could not learn what they sought. That university which is a place to study rather than a place to live is missing its best possibilities, and in a similar way the library ought to be, first and always, a place to read rather than a place to study. I would not go so far as to say that I want to find it a place to "loaf," though I might be provoked into saying so; but certainly it must be a place where I can "invite my soul"--such a place as the world gives me elsewhere only in the church or in the silence of nature. Trade journals and technical works are of great use; books for women's clubs are good things; the children's room is a necessity; but these of themselves no more make a library than a kitchen, dining room and bedroom make a home. Out of such utilities as these you may get a boarding house, but nothing better; the family makes it a home. Those are wholly wrong who believe that standard books are so cheap that anyone can buy them, and therefore the library could conceivably get on without them. Without the best literature you might get a very useful institution, no doubt, but not a library, for in a library the great works of the great authors are the soul and theirs is the spirit which enables the library not merely to contribute to the advance of the community toward prosperity and intelligence, but also, in some degree, to touch its higher life to finer issues.

THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

AN ADDRESS AT ITS DEDICATION

This and the four addresses that follow it have little in common except that all were delivered at the opening exercises of libraries. Everett's address at the opening of the Boston Public Library appropriately heads the group. The reader will look in it in vain for any reflection of the conservative opinions expressed in the letter to George Ticknor printed on page 53 of this volume, unless perhaps in the total absence of anything radical. It is typical oratory of the day--ponderously graceful, if that is not a contradiction in terms.

Edward Everett was born in Dorchester, Mass., April 11, 1794. He graduated at Harvard in 1811 and served there as professor of Greek in 1819-25. He was a member of Congress in 1825-35, governor of Massachusetts in 1836-40, minister to Great Britain in 1841-45, president of Harvard, 1846-49, U.S. secretary of state in 1852-53, and U.S. senator in 1853-54. He died in Boston, Jan. 15, 1865. His reputation as a scholarly orator was very high.

MR. MAYOR:--

In behalf of the Trustees of the City Library, I receive with extreme pleasure the keys which you have placed in my hands. The completion of the noble building, which the city government now confides to our care, is an event to which the Trustees have looked forward with the greatest interest, and which they now contemplate with the highest satisfaction. They deem themselves especially honored in their connection with an institution, for whose use this stately and commodious edifice has been erected, and which they doubt not is destined to be instrumental of the highest good to the community, and to reflect lasting credit upon the liberality, public and private, with which it has been founded and endowed.

The city of Boston, owing to peculiar circumstances in its growth and history, has been at all times, as I think, beyond most cities in the world, the object of an affectionate attachment on the part of its inhabitants; a feeling entitled to respect and productive of good, even if it may sometimes seem to strangers over-partial in its manifestations. It is not merely its commanding natural situation, the triple hills on which it is enthroned, its magnificent bay and harbor, and the group of islands and islets that sparkle like emeralds on their surface; not merely this most admirable common, which opens before our windows, delightful even at this season of the year, and affording us in summer, in its noble malls and shady walks, all that the country can boast of cool and beautiful and salubrious, transported to the heart of the city, "the poor man's pleasure-ground," as it has been well called, though a king might envy it;--nor the environs of our city of surpassing loveliness, which enclose it on every side in kindly embrace; it is not solely nor principally these natural attractions which endear Boston to its citizens. Nor is it exclusively the proud and grateful memories of the past,--of the high-souled fathers and mothers of the land, venerable in their self-denying virtues, majestic in the austere simplicity of their manners, conscientious in their errors, who, with amazing sacrifices and hardships never to be described, sought out new homes in the wilderness, and transmitted to us delights and blessings which it was not given to themselves to enjoy;--of those who in succeeding generations deserved well of their country,--the pioneers of the Revolution, the men of the stamp act age, whose own words and acts are stamped on the pages of history, in characters never to be effaced;--of those who, when the decisive hour came, stood forth in that immortal HALL, the champions of their country's rights, while it scarcely yet deserved the name of a country; it is not exclusively these proud and grateful associations, which attach the dutiful Bostonian to the city of his birth or adoption.

No, Mr. Mayor, it is not exclusively these, much as they contribute to strengthen the sentiment. It has its origin, in no small degree, in the personal relation in which Boston places herself to her children; in the parental interest which she cherishes in their welfare, which leads her to take them by the hand almost from the cradle,--to train them up in the ascending series of her excellent free schools; watching over them as a fond father watches over the objects of his love and hope; in a word, to confer upon them a first-rate school education at the public expense. Often have I attempted, but with very partial success, both in this country and in Europe, to persuade inquiring friends from the countries and places where no such well-organized system of public education prevails, that our free schools do really afford to the entire population means of elementary education, of which the wealthiest citizen is glad to avail himself.

And now, Mr. Mayor, the enlightened counsels of the city government are about to give new strength to those ties of gratitude and affection, which bind the hearts of the children of Boston to their beloved city. Hitherto the system of public education, excellent as it is and wisely supported by a princely expenditure, does but commence the work of instruction and carry it to a certain point; well advanced, indeed, but far short of the goal. It prepares our young men for college, for the counting-room, for the office of the engineer, the _studio_ of the artist, the shop of the artisan, the laboratory of the chemist, or whatever field of employment they may be destined to enter, but there it leaves them, without further provision for the culture of the mind. It disciplines the faculties and forms a taste for the acquisition of knowledge, on the part of our young men and women, but it provides no means for their exercise and gratification. It gives them the elementary education requisite for their future callings, but withholds all facilities of access to those boundless stores of recorded knowledge, in every department, by which alone that elementary education can be completed and made effectual for the active duties of life.

But to-day our honored city carries on and perfects her work. The trustees, from their first annual report to the present time, have never failed to recommend a first class public library, such as that, sir, for whose accommodation you destine this noble building, as the completion of the great system of public education. Its object is to give to the entire population, not merely to the curious student, but to the inquisitive member of either of the professions, to the intelligent merchant, mechanic, machinist, engineer, artist or artisan, in short, to all of every age and of either sex, who desire to investigate any subject, either of utility or taste, those advantages which, without such an ample public collection, must necessarily be monopolized by the proprietors of large private libraries, or those who by courtesy have the use of them; nay, to put within the reach of the entire community advantages of this kind, far beyond those which can be afforded by the largest and best provided private libraries.

The trustees are anxious that the institution, whose prosperity they have so much at heart, should continue to be viewed in this light; as one more added to the school-houses of the city, at which Boston boys and girls, when they have outgrown the other schools, will come to carry on the education which has been there commenced; where Boston men and women, "children of a larger growth," may come to acquire that additional knowledge which is requisite for the most successful discharge of the duties of the various callings of society,--which opens, in its pursuit, the purest sources of happiness,--and which, without reference to utility, contributes so materially to the grace and ornament of life.

I am aware that there is still floating about in the community a vague prejudice against what is called book-learning. One sometimes hears doubts expressed of the utility of public libraries; opinions that they are rather ornamental than necessary or useful; and the fact that our time-honored city, never indifferent to the mental improvement of her children, has existed more than two centuries without one, is a sufficient proof, that, until within a very few years, their importance has not been practically felt. There is perhaps even now a disposition to claim some superiority for what is called practical knowledge--knowledge gained by observation and experience (which most certainly the trustees would not disparage), and a kind of satisfaction felt in holding up the example of self-taught men, in supposed contradistinction from those who have got their knowledge from books. No name perhaps is so frequently mentioned for this purpose as that of Franklin, who, because he had scarce any school education and never went to college, has been hastily set down as a brilliant example to show the inutility of book-learning. It has been quoted to me in this way, and to show that libraries are of no use, within three days.

Now, Mr. Mayor, I need not tell you that there never was a greater mistake in point of fact. A thirst for books, which he spared no pains to allay, is the first marked trait disclosed in the character of Franklin; his success throughout the early period of his life can be directly traced to the use he made of them; and his very first important movement for the benefit of his fellow-men was to found a public library, which still flourishes;--one of the most considerable in the country. Franklin not a book-man! whoever labors under that delusion, shows that somebody else is not a book-man, at least so far as concerns the biography of our illustrious townsman. We happen to have a little information on that subject, in a book written by Franklin himself. He there gives a very different account of himself, and I would ask any one who entertains the idea to which I am alluding, at what period of Franklin's career he supposes this taste for books began to be manifested by him; how soon he ceased to be a self-formed man? Perhaps after he had struggled through the years of his youthful poverty, escaped to Philadelphia, set up in business as a printer, and begun to have a little money in his pocket. I need not tell you, sir, that it was earlier than that. Was it, then, while he was the clever apprentice to his brother, the editor of a journal, and wrote articles for its columns in a disguised hand, and tucked them under the office door, enjoying the exquisite delight of being ordered to set up his own anonymous articles; was it then, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, that this fondness for reading, under the stimulus of boyish authorship, disclosed itself? Earlier than that. Well, then, at the grammar-school and Master Brownwell's writing-school, which he attended from eight to ten (for there are boys who show a fondness for reading, even at that tender age); was little Benjamin's taste for books developed while yet at school? Earlier than that. Hear his own words, which you will permit me to read from that exquisite piece of autobiography to which I have already alluded: "From my INFANCY I was _passionately_ fond of reading, and all the money that came into my hands was laid out in purchasing books. I was very fond of voyages. My first acquisition was Bunyan's works, in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton's _Historical Collections_. They were small chapman's books and cheap, forty volumes in all. My father's little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have often regretted [and this is a sentence that might be inscribed on the lofty cornice of this noble hall] that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way.... There was among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of Defoe's, called an _Essay on Projects_, and another of Dr. Mather's, called an _Essay to do Good_, which"--did what, sir? For I am now going to give you, in Franklin's own words (they carry with them the justification of every dollar expended in raising these walls), the original secret of his illustrious career--what was the effect produced by reading these two little books of Defoe and Cotton Mather? "they perhaps gave me a turn of thinking, which had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life." Yes, sir, in the reading of those books was the acorn that sprouted into that magnificent oak; there was the fountain-drop which a fairy might have sipped from a buttercup, from which has flowed the Missouri and the Mississippi,--the broad, deep river of Franklin's fame, winding its way through the lapse of ages, and destined to flow on, till it shall be ingulfed in the ocean of eternity.

From his "infancy," sir, "passionately fond of reading," nay, with the appetite of a vulture, with the digestion of an ostrich, attacking the great folios of polemic divinity in his father's library. Not a dull boy, either; not a precocious little bookworm; fond of play; doesn't dislike a little mischief; sometimes, as he tells us, "led the other boys into scrapes;" but in his intervals of play, in his leisure moments, up in the lonely garret when the rest of the family were asleep, holding converse in his childhood with the grave old non-conformists, Howe and Owen and Flavel and Baxter,--communing with the austerest lords of thought; the demigods of puritanism.

Franklin not a book-man? Why, he goes on to tell us that it was "this bookish inclination which at length determined his father to make him a printer," against his own inclination, which was for the sea; and when he had thus by constraint become a printer, his great consolation was, as he says, that "I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and clean. Often I sat up in my chamber reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and was to be returned in the morning, lest it should be found missing."

Then he made the acquaintance of Mr. Matthew Adams, an ingenious, sensible man, "who had a pretty collection of books." He frequented the printing-office, took notice of the bright little apprentice, and "very kindly proposed to lend me such books as I chose to read." Having taken to a vegetable diet at the age of sixteen, he persuaded his brother to allow him in cash half the price of his board,--lived upon potatoes and hasty pudding,--soon found that he could save half even of that little allowance (which could not have exceeded two-and-six-pence a week, lawful money), and this poor little economy "was an additional fund for buying books." What would the poor, underfed boy, who was glad to buy books on the savings of his potato diet, have said could he have had free access to a hall like this, stored as it soon will be with its priceless treasures?

Further, sir, while working as a journeyman in England, he says, "I made the acquaintance of one William Wilcox, a bookseller, whose shop was next door. He had an immense collection of second-hand books."--(Somewhat, I suppose, like our friend Burnham, in Cornhill.)--"Circulating libraries were not then in use, but we agreed that on certain reasonable terms, which I have now forgotten, I might take, read, and return any of his works. This I esteemed a great advantage, and I made as much use of it as I could."

Finally, sir, as I have already said, Franklin's first important movement for the good of his fellow-men was the foundation of the public library in Philadelphia. At his instance, the members of a little club to which he belonged, tradesmen and mechanics of narrow means, threw into common stock the few books which belonged to them. A subscription was then obtained from fifty young men, principally tradesmen, of two pounds each, and ten shillings _per annum_, and with this little fund they began. "The books were imported, the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned." "This was the mother," says Franklin, "of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous. It has become a great thing itself, and continually goes on increasing. These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and, perhaps, have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges."

Those are the words of Franklin, Mr. Mayor, which I read from his own book. Our excellent friend the President of the Commissioners (Hon. R.C. Winthrop) has justly felicitated himself on having been the first person publicly to raise his voice in this noble hall. He must be a happier man than I who can speak an earlier or an abler word than his on any occasion; but I claim the credit of having read from the first book opened in this hall;--and what is more, sir, I mean to have the satisfaction of presenting the first volume given to the library, since this building came into the care of the Trustees. In your presence, Mr. Mayor, and that of this vast assembly on this first of January, 1858, I offer this copy of Franklin's Autobiography in Sparks's edition, as a New Year's gift to the Boston Public Library. Nay, sir, I am going to do more, and make the first, and perhaps the last, motion ever made in this hall; and that is, that every person present, of his own accord, if of age,--with the consent of parent or guardian, if a minor,--man, woman, boy, or girl, be requested, on going home, to select one good book, and in memory of the poor boy, who half-fed himself to gratify his taste for reading, present it as a New-Year's gift to the Boston Public Library. I make you that motion, Mr. Mayor, and I call upon all present to give me their voices: especially I ask the cooperation of the fairer and better part of creation. If nowhere else, woman's rights shall be respected in this hall, while I have anything to do with it. I pray you, Mr. Mayor, put the question, and then I'll finish my speech.

His Honor the Mayor then rose and stated the question, which was seconded by Mr. Winthrop. The mayor particularly called on the ladies to vote, and a unanimous and emphatic aye resounded through the vast hall. The negative was then called and no response made. His Honor, amidst great cheering and laughter, pronounced it a unanimous vote. Mr. Everett resumed--

No, sir, if there is one lesson more than another directly deducible from the life of Franklin, it is the close connection of a thoroughly practical and useful life and career with books, libraries, and reading. If there is a thing on earth which would have gladdened his heart could he have anticipated it, it would be the knowledge that his native city, in two generations after his death, would found a library like this, to give to the rising generation and to the lovers of knowledge of every age that access to books, of which he so much felt the want. And could it be granted to him, even now, to return to his native city, which dwelt in his affections to the close of his life, his first visit would be to the centre of the ancient burial-ground, where in after-life he dutifully placed a marble slab on the graves of his parents; his second visit would be to the spot in Milk street where he was born; his third to the corner of Union street and Hanover street, where he passed his childhood, in a house still standing; his fourth visit would be to the site of the free grammar school-house, where, as he says in his will, he received "his first instruction in literature," and which is now adorned with a statue which a grateful posterity has dedicated to his memory; and his last and longest would be to this noble hall, where you are making provision for an ample supply of that reading of which, "from his _infancy_ he was _passionately_ fond." The trustees have done what they could to connect some reference to Franklin with an institution which would have been the object of his warmest affections, by providing that every Franklin medal boy shall be entitled to its privileges; and inasmuch as the accumulating fund which he bequeathed to the city, and which now exceeds seventy thousand dollars, has proved almost wholly unavailing for the primary object of the bequest, it deserves consideration whether, when it has reached a sufficient magnitude, as it will before the end of this century, the interest of the fund, if it can be legally done, might not advantageously be appropriated, as a permanent endowment for the support of the library.

I have not proposed at this time, sir, on the part of the trustees, to make a formal speech; I have preferred to let Benjamin Franklin speak for us. This day belongs of right to the commissioners for building the library, ably represented as they are, by our distinguished friend their president, who has done such ample justice to the subject; and to you, Mr. Mayor, as the organ of the city government, whom I cannot but congratulate on closing your official career,--in all respects so honorable to yourself and so acceptable to your fellow-citizens,--by an act, I am sure, most grateful to your own feelings and most auspicious of the public good. It is not yet the time for the trustees to speak. A more fitting opportunity may hereafter present itself, when the books shall be placed on the shelves, the catalogue printed, and the library opened for public use. Occasion may then, perhaps, with propriety be taken, to illustrate the importance and utility of such an institution; to do justice to the liberality on the part of the city government and the individual benefactors by which it has been founded, endowed, and sustained; and especially to the generosity of our greatest benefactor and esteemed fellow-countryman, Mr. Bates, whose letters announcing his first munificent donation of fifty thousand dollars, alluding to his own early want of access to books, assign that as the moving cause which prompted his liberality. It will be the pleasing duty of those who may then be intrusted with the administration of the library, to pay a fitting tribute to so much public and private bounty.

In the mean time, sir, we must throw ourselves on the patience and considerateness of the city council and the community. Not much short of sixty thousand volumes are to be brought together from four different places of temporary deposit, and assigned to their final resting-places in this hall and the circulating library below. Here they are to be arranged on the shelves, the cards and slips which pertain to them, far more numerous than the volumes themselves, reduced to alphabetical order; a separate catalogue of each alcove prepared; and a comprehensive catalogue of the whole collection, without which it will be little better than an unmanageable mass, prepared and printed. Every thing which could be done beforehand, has been anticipated; but much of the work was of necessity reserved till the books should be placed on the shelves. In the interval, and while this labor is going on, the library in Mason street will be left in possession of the books most in request for daily circulation, and will be closed at last only when it becomes absolutely necessary that they also should be removed to the new building.

But it is time for me to conclude. The shades of evening are falling around us; those cressets which lend us their mild and tasteful illumination will soon be extinguished; and the first day of the New-Year, rich in the happy prospects we now inaugurate, will come to a close. May the blessing of Heaven give effect to its brightest anticipations. A few more days,--a few more years,--will follow their appointed round, and we, who now exchange our congratulations on this magnificent New-Year's gift of our city fathers, shall have passed from the scene; but firm in the faith that the growth of knowledge is the growth of sound principles and pure morals, let us not doubt, that, by the liberality of the city government and of our generous benefactors at home and abroad, a light will be kindled and go forth from these walls, now dedicated to the use of the FREE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, which will guide our children and our children's children in the path of intelligence and virtue, till the sun himself shall fall from the heavens.

THE NEW YORK FREE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

ADDRESS IN ITS FAVOR AT A PUBLIC MEETING

President Cleveland made this address on March 6, 1890, while a resident of New York City in the interval between his two presidential terms, at a meeting, at Chickering Hall, called for the purpose of directing attention to the work of the struggling Free Circulating Library and if possible to raise funds for its support, which was only partially insured by the City. Owing to increase in both public and private contributions this library was enabled to make rapid growth in the years immediately following until in 1901, when it was merged in the Circulation Department of the New York Public Library, it was operating eleven branches with a circulation of over 600,000. This institution was the pioneer of the popular, as distinguished from the scholarly, library idea in New York.

[Stephen] Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell, N.J., March 18, 1837, the fifth son of a Presbyterian clergyman. He received a common-school education and after his father's death went in 1855 to live with an uncle in Buffalo, N.Y. He was admitted to the bar there in 1859, was assistant district attorney in 1863-66, sheriff in 1871-74 and mayor in 1882. In the latter year he was elected Governor of New York and in 1884 President of the United States. He was an unsuccessful candidate for re-election in 1888, but was elected again in 1892. He died in Princeton, N.J., where he had resided since his last presidential term, on June 24, 1908.

The words I shall speak on this occasion I intend rather as a pledge of my adherance to the cause in which you are enlisted than an attempt to say anything new or instructive. I gladly join with the enthusiasm of a new convert in the felicitations of those who have done noble and effective work in the establishment and maintenance in our city of a free circulating library, and it seems to me they have abundant cause for congratulation in review of the good which has already been accomplished through their efforts and in the contemplation of the further usefulness which awaits their continued endeavor.

In every enlightened country the value of popular education is fully recognized, not only as a direct benefit to its recipients, but as an element of strength and safety in organized society. Considered in these aspects it should nowhere be better appreciated than in this land of free institutions consecrated to the welfare and happiness of its citizens, and deriving its sanction and its power from the people. Here the character of the people is inevitably impressed upon the government, and here our public life can no more be higher and purer than the life of the people, than a stream can rise above its fountain or be purer than the spring in which it has its source.

That we have not failed to realize these conditions is demonstrated by the establishment of free public schools on every side, where children are not only invited but often obliged to submit themselves to such instruction as will better their situation in life and fit them to take part intelligently in the conduct of the government.

Thus, in our schools the young are taught to read, and in this manner the seed is sown, from which we expect a profitable return to the state, when its beneficiaries shall repay the educational advances made to them by an intelligent and patriotic performance of their social and political duties.

And yet if we are to create good citizenship, which is the object of popular education, and if we are to insure to the country the full benefit of public instruction, we can by no means consider the work as completely done in the schoolroom. While the young gathered there are fitting themselves to assume in the future their political obligations, there are others upon whom these obligations already rest, and who now have the welfare and safety of the country in their keeping. Our work is badly done if these are neglected. They have passed the school age, and have perhaps availed themselves of free instruction; but they, as well as those still in the school, should, nevertheless, have within their reach the means of further mental improvement and the opportunity of gaining that additional knowledge and information which can only be secured by access to useful and instructive books.

The husbandman who expects to gain a profitable return from his orchards, not only carefully tends and cultivates the young trees in his nurseries as they grow to maturity but he generously enriches and cares for those in bearing and upon which he must rely for ripened fruit.

Teaching the children of our land to read is but the first step in the scheme of creating good citizens by means of free instruction. We teach the young to read so that both as children and as men and women they may read. Our teaching must lead to the habit and the desire of reading to be useful; and only as this result is reached can the work in our free schools be logically supplemented and made valuable.

Therefore, the same wise policy and intent which open the doors of our free schools to our young, also suggest the completion of the plan thus entered upon by placing books in the hands of those who in our schools have been taught to read.

A man or woman who never reads and is abandoned to unthinking torpor, or who allows the entire mental life to be bounded by the narrow lines of the daily recurring routine of effort for mere existence, cannot escape a condition of barrenness of mind, which not only causes the decay of individual contentment and happiness, but which fails to yield to the state its justly expected return of usefulness in valuable service and wholesome political action.

Another branch of this question should not be overlooked. It is not only of great importance that our youth and our men and women should have the ability, the desire, and the opportunity to read, but the kind of books they read is no less important. Without guidance and without the invitation and encouragement to read publications which will improve as well as interest, there is danger that our people will have in their hands books whose influence and tendency are of a negative sort, if not positively bad and mischievous. Like other good things, the ability and opportunity to read may be so used as to defeat their beneficient purposes.

The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible to the young will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not tend to make him a useful member of society.

The man who devotes himself to the flash literature now much too common will, instead of increasing his value as a citizen, almost surely degenerate in his ideas of public duty and grow dull in appreciation of the obligations he owes his country.

In both these cases there will be a loss to the state. There is danger also that a positive and aggressive injury to the community will result, and such readers will certainly suffer deprivation to the happiness and contentment which are the fruits of improving study and well-regulated thought.

So, too, the young woman who seeks recreation and entertainment in reading silly and frivolous books, often of doubtful moral tendency, is herself in the way of becoming frivolous and silly, if not of weak morality. If she escapes this latter condition, she is certain to become utterly unfitted to bear patiently the burden of self-support or to assume the sacred duties of wife and mother.

Contemplating these truths, no one can doubt the importance of securing for those who read, as far as it is in our power, facilities for the study and reading of such books as will instruct and innocently entertain, and which will at the same time improve and correct the tastes and habits.

There is another thought somewhat in advance of those already suggested, which should not pass unnoticed.

As an outgrowth of the inventive and progressive spirit of our people, we have among us legions of men, and women, too, who restlessly desire to increase their knowledge of the new forces and agencies which at this time are being constantly dragged from their lurking-places and subjected to the use of man. Those earnest inquirers should all be given a chance and have put within their reach such books as will guide and inspire their efforts. If by this means the country shall gain to itself a new inventor or be the patron of endeavor which shall add new elements to the sum of human happiness and comfort, its intervention will be well repaid.

These considerations, and the fact that many among us having the ability and inclination to read are unable to furnish themselves with profitable and wholesome books amply justify the beneficient mission of our Free Circulating Library. Its plan and operation, so exactly adjusted to meet a situation which cannot safely be ignored and to wants which ought not to be neglected, establish its claim upon the encouragement and reasonable aid of the public authorities and commend it most fully to the support and generosity of private benefaction.

The development which this good work has already reached in our city has exhibited the broad field yet remaining untouched and the inadequacy of present operations. It has brought to view also instances of noble individual philanthropy and disinterested private effort and contribution.

But it certainly seems that the time and money directed towards this object are confined to a circle of persons far too narrow, and that the public encouragement and aid have been greatly disproportioned to private endeavor.

The city of New York has never shown herself willing to be behind other cities in such work as is done by our Free Circulating Library, and while her people are much engrossed in business activity and enterprise they have never yet turned away from a cause once demonstrated to them to be so worthy and useful as this.

The demonstration is at hand. Let it be pressed upon our fellow citizens, and let them be shown the practical operation of the project you have in hand and the good it has accomplished, and the further good of which it is capable through their increased liberality, and it will be strange if they fail to respond generously to your appeal to put the city of New York in the front rank of the cities which have recognized the usefulness of the free circulating libraries.

THE WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM

ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF ITS LIBRARY IN HARTFORD, CONN., JAN. 2, 1893.

These addresses, by Charles Dudley Warner and Charles H. Clark, are reprinted from brief abstracts given in _The Library Journal_ of January, 1893.

Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plainfield, Mass., Sept. 12, 1829 and graduated at Hamilton College in 1851. He practised law in Chicago in 1856-60 and in 1861 became managing editor of the Hartford, Conn., _Press_. In 1867 on its consolidation with the _Courant_, he became co-editor. He was made associate editor of _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884, and died at Hartford, Oct. 20, 1900. He was widely popular as an essayist, first gaining favorable notice by his "My Summer in a Garden."

This building and its contents are contributory to the excellence and enjoyment of life exactly as Bushnall Park is--not merely that it is a place of rest and recreation, but it is a training in beauty, in the appreciation of nobleness, and in the public and private refinement. Culture is a plant of rather slow growth. I suppose there never was such a change wrought, almost instantaneously, in a people as was wrought in the American people by the opening and exhibition of the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Its effect was at once apparent everywhere. But knowledge precedes culture, culture being, after all, but another name for educational taste.

Now this institution is simply a means for the culture of the city of Hartford, in all ways, because literature and art--not taken externally, but absorbed as a part of our lives, not only of knowledge, but of experience--are the things that make life worth living.

No one can speak too highly of the offices of a great library. It was one of our great essayists, you remember, who said that the monastery--speaking of it with reference to its books--was the ark that floated down over the tempest and darkness of the middle ages, in order to carry classic learning to the fifteenth century. They were repositories of learning. That is the old idea. And for a long time--almost to our day--that was the notion of the library. It was a place to put something away. It was not even like a market for the sale of provisions or eggs; indeed, if they were eggs the librarians thought it their duty to sit on them, with the idea that they might hatch out other books. That was a noble thing to do. But much better than that is to scatter these books abroad among the people, so that we shall not have reproduction--an egg for an egg--but that these books will so revivify the life that we shall have books new, that express the actual conditions and that appeal to the human life as it is. This is the modern idea of the library. This great collection, which is not to be secluded, is to be carried and even forced upon the people, so that it shall enter into and become a part of their daily lives.

You remember, perhaps, what Milton says about the books, in that noblest of noble defences of unlicensed printing, that "they are not dead things. As good almost," he says, "kill a man as you kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable being, made in God's image. Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God as it were, in the eye. Many a man," he goes on to say, "lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so that if we slay a good book we would slay immortality rather than a life."

Charles Hopkins Clark, who immediately followed Mr. Warner, was at this time editor in chief of _The Hartford Courant_, of which Mr. Warner was co-editor. Mr. Clark was born in Hartford April 1, 1848, graduated at Yale, and joined the _Courant_ staff in 1871, becoming editor in 1890.

One of the earliest sins of my youth, or rather one of the earliest that is burnt into my memory, was committed in the library of what was then the Young Men's Institute. I spoke out loud! The rebuke that I received sent me down the stairs overwhelmed with a sense of the enormity of my crime, yet more than sustained by joy to think that I had escaped the utter annihilation with which my reprimand was freighted. And I can say that the awe with which I used to enter that chamber of silence, and the fear with which I regarded the librarian were the common property of all the young people of that somewhat remote period. But long since we found out that the old librarian was one of the gentlest and most inoffensive men, and that we had misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood us.

But I have no such gloomy recollection, nor to be honest, have I any recollection at all of the Wadsworth Athenaeum gallery, because, like everybody else who then lived in Hartford, I never went in there. The door was often open and the only sentinel on guard had no more formidable weapon than a pair of knitting-needles. But no one ever crossed that threshold. The simple legend, traced on a placard at the door, "Admission Ten Cents," did the business, or rather, to be more elegant as well as accurate, prevented any business being done. The people who came up the stone steps read the notice and turned off to the left to the library or to the right to the Historical Society, where entrance was free. I say free, but freedom must have its limits if we are to have safety, so the tin sign on the outside of the door gave notice to the always unwelcome boy that he could not go in until he reached the mature age of twelve years. That was one of the things that I wanted to grow to full manhood for.

And I well remember my first visit there. As I walked slowly up the stairs I wondered what venerable monument of patriotic achievement, what new inspiration to love for our noble State whose history is such a priceless treasure, what vision of heroic self-sacrifice in her behalf would first burst upon my eager eyes when I should look around the hall. I looked and lo! there in a glass jar stood the chaste but familiar figure of Charles Hosmer's night-blooming cereus--the modest pioneer of the canned-fruit industry in this community.

I have made this brief review in order to suggest to you the state of innocuous desuetude in which for more or less time the various miscalled interests in this building had been lying for lack of any interest at all. The library had a limited and dwindling clientage. The Athenaeum was deserted. The Historical Society, with no funds and few friends, was exhibiting a collection of animal, vegetable, and mineral curiosities, while its real treasures of history and truth were by lock and key shut off from the very public for whom they were collected and preserved. Look at that picture, then look at this which greets us here to day.

In these elegant and spacious buildings the whole public of Hartford is welcome, without money and without price. The circulating library will furnish every home with books, and Miss Hewins, who has devoted her life to this town, is always ready to help the younger readers. The Library of Reference, monument alike to Mr. Watkinson's liberality and Dr. Trumbull's rare judgment and life-long devoted service as a librarian, offers free to all students the authorities on every branch of knowledge. The Historical Society, with improved facilities, has been able to adopt a more liberal policy, and is widening its claim upon public interest, and so increasing its usefulness, and, thanks largely to the women of Hartford, the Art Gallery and Art School are ready to spread their refining and wholesome influence all through this community.

LIBRARIES AS LEAVEN

This address was delivered at the inauguration of the Free Public Library, Madison, Wis., by Prof. James D. Butler.

James Davie Butler was born in Rutland, Vt., March 15, 1815, and was graduated at Middlebury College, Vt., in 1836. He entered the Congregational ministry, and held the chairs of ancient languages in Wabash College, 1854-58 and the University of Wisconsin, 1858-67, after which he devoted himself to lecturing and writing until his death in Madison in 1905.

My subject is "Libraries as Leaven," or the relation of libraries to the increased diffusion of knowledge.

What is a Library? It is the knowledge of all brought within the reach of each one. It is an expanded encyclopaedia, or the books which are, or ought to be, consulted in compiling a perfect encyclopaedia.

Human knowledge--and hence the books in which it is treasured up--is divided by some authors into forty departments. I have their names here all written down--but I dare not read them. You would give no more quarter to such a catalogue than the lover gave to the mercantile inventory of his sweetheart's charms, when itemized as "two lips indifferent red," "two gray eyes with lids to them," and so on.

But all these forty classes of knowledge ought to be represented in a library, and the more largely the better. They should also mingle there in due proportion, "parts into parts reciprocally shot, and all so forming a harmonious whole." "If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing?"

I once lived in a town of a thousand families, where, through a legacy, one copy of some single author was annually presented to each family. But, with the same money, a thousand different works might have been every year purchased, and all kept accessible by all the families. The result would have been a feast as appetizing to all palates as the miraculous manna which the rabbins tell us tasted to each Jew like that particular dainty which he loved best.

It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through. No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for a man to read all the words in the daily _Tribune_. Nor will any customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from bibliothecal rubbish--or reading which had never been read. Hence even Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an ass: "I have no need of you." The wise thank God for fools. They get their living out of them, and mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough. Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee.

A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement, catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable lost in mid-ocean.

"Thus warlike arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order and disposed with grace: Not thus alone the curious eye to please, But to be _found_, when need requires, with ease."

In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems borrowed from Spanish hospitals, where patients are arranged according to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult.

Chief Justice Story used to assert that no American could test the accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an assertion would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet penetrated west of our Atlantic slope.

But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the Pacific shore, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array of bibliothecal catalogues.

Why will not our Centenary Women's Club buy our Free Library a Zosimus?

Free libraries, especially those maintained by public taxation, were scarcely known before the last half of the nineteenth century. If in an antiquarian mood, I could indeed bring forth curious details concerning half a hundred in continental Europe, some of them running back several centuries, but I forbear. The earliest British library law, similar to ours in Wisconsin, dates from 1850. The earliest in Massachusetts--and I suppose in America--was approved May 24, 1851. The first library opened in consequence of this law was in New Bedford, March 3, 1853. The grandest triumph under the Massachusetts law is in Boston. The free library there stands to-day surpassed in volumes by only three or four American libraries--say the Astor, Congress, and Harvard--while in arrangement, architecture, and equipment it is pronounced by the most enlightened foreigners unsurpassed by any library in the world.

Our legislature in 1872 empowered the mayors and councils in towns and cities to lay an annual tax of one mill on a dollar of the assessed valuation, for establishing and maintaining free libraries. This law will bear good fruit. Yet it is a step backward from the act of 1859. That act created a library fund by setting apart for that purpose one-tenth of the school-fund income, and imposing a tax of one-tenth of a mill on all property. The sum of $88,784.78 had been thus accumulated when the war of 1861 broke out,--and the money was used for military purposes. It ought to be refunded by the State, or United States, and expended for its original object. The great superiority of the law of 1859 lies in its extending to rural districts,--and so leaving no hamlet unvisited--while the maxim of the present law is, "Coals to Newcastle, owls to Athens, apples to Alcinous. He that hath--to him shall be given." It gives a library to Madison, where 40,000 volumes were already within reach, but nothing at all to five and twenty other places in Dane County, whose need of books is ten times greater. But libraries bring forth after their kind, and free libraries, we may hope, will become co-extensive with free schools.

Madison, to-day, in opening to all her sons and daughters a Free Library, has outstripped every other municipality in the State. It is a noble preeminence, and will do her honor to the end of the world.

The Madison Free Library, it may be reasonably hoped, will approximate to the bibliothecal ideal. It starts with an inheritance of 3,308 volumes, accumulated during a score of years by the Madison Institute. Its revenue is considerable, and it will grow in even pace with the growth of the city. Nothing but Adam and Minerva was ever born of full stature. The tax now assessed for it would impoverish no man till after the lapse of thrice three thousand years. It was limited to less than a third of what the law allows because we make the entering edge of a wedge thin, and would learn wisdom from Satan who never makes his temptations so bad at the beginning as at the end. Is is only the first step that costs. The Free Library will be ready for windfalls, and so surely as history repeats itself, they will pour cornucopias into its lap. Of the million volumes in the British Museum, two out of every five were gifts. No wonder. Book-gatherers abhor the breaking up of their collections as we do the dissolution of the Union, or as abolitionists did the snapping of family ties by slave-traders. Lest what they have joined together shall be put asunder, they rejoice to lay up their treasures in an institution which shall never die. Accordingly, in tracing the origin of one hundred and eighty libraries in continental Europe, it has been discovered that all of them, except sixteen, were presented to the municipalities by book-lovers.

Experience this side the Atlantic is thus far equally encouraging. I will notice a single specimen. The Boston Free Library is mainly contributed by individuals. One thousand volumes were given by Everett; 2,300 by Bowditch; 11,360 by Theodore Parker; 26,000 by Joshua Bates; 11,899 by the Old South Church, and those of greater rarity than any other equal number of volumes. Then Ticknor and Prescott bestowed the best Spanish library ever gathered by private men, and Wheelwright one scarcely inferior, relating to South America. Of pecuniary benefactions, I will only mention $10,000 from Lawrence, $30,000 from Phillips, and $50,000 from Bates. But legacies to the Free Library have become so common that we may confidently expect that, if any Bostonian shall die and bequeath it nothing, the courts will decide the neglect of the Library to be conclusive proof of insanity, and so will nullify his will! On the whole, we cannot be too sanguine concerning the prospective progress of our book-feast for the million.

But a library, however perfect, and though freely open to all the world, may be a light shining in a darkness which comprehendeth it not. Many years ago, I was a student in such a library at Rome. It was larger than any one in America at that time, and offered the best of all its stores daily to everybody, and that without charge. Yet it was well-nigh a solitude. The reason was obvious. My walk thither was through a gauntlet of beggar-boys, and I once took with me an Italian primer, and cried out that I would give something to any boy who could read. I held it up before nineteen in succession, but no one could spell out a line. They had eschewed not only writing as tempting to forgery, but reading also as a black art. Had they been giants they could,--like the barbarians who sacked Rome,--ruin, but not relish, the nectared sweets of books. To them the collective wisdom of the world was as sunshine to the blind, or as smoke in the nursery riddle,--"roomful, houseful, can't catch a handful!"

"Or like gospel pearls which pigs neglect When pigs have that opportunity."

But in regard to _our_ Free Library, I have better hopes, and beg your leave to show _what use_, in my judgment, will be made of it. It will be resorted to for _amusement_. Some will flit through it in the spirit of the Viennese, who turn their central cathedral into a thoroughfare on promenades and business walks. But such visitors will learn something in glancing at the backs of books. Books, as well as men, have a physiognomy. Here, as elsewhere, the admirers of Shakespeare will take out his plays, return them with the leaves uncut, and then insist that booksellers be instructed if Mr. Shakespeare writes any new book, to forward it without further orders. Many will have no eyes except for the volumes of _fiction_, and sometimes will rather run through these than read them. Novels are a sort of cake, which, if eaten alone, is prone to make mental dyspeptics. Yet most novel-readers will gain some profit from our library. Some of them will here acquire a facility in reading which for lack of practice has hitherto been unknown to them. No one has really learned to read, until he has read to learn. Their interest in stories will beguile the toil of becoming _ready_ readers, and their range of reading will naturally widen. But if it does not, they may learn much. Every good fiction is _true_, if not to particular fact yet to general principles, to natural scenery, to human nature, to the ways of human life, manners, customs, the very age and body of the time. Even Tom Moore declares that "his chief work of fiction is founded on a long and labourious collection of facts." Again, when worn out by work, when care-crazed, and nerves are unstrung, who has not found in fiction--the balm of hurt minds--a recreation, a city of refuge, a restorative.

"Cups that cheer but not inebriate?"

In this way our free library will be a new pleasure, and the founder of it deserves the reward offered by the Sicilian tyrant, for such an invention. Work was never so monotonous as now; accordingly, play ought to be more than ever amusing. The Kilkenny cats, who devoured each other all but the tails, left one orphan kitten which began to eat up itself, but catching sight of a mouse was diverted from suicide. There is among us more than one disconsolate kitten now destroying himself, who will in our free feast of fiction espy a mouse which will reconcile him to life, and save him from himself. The rationale of this solace is indicated after a forcible, though rather a homely fashion, in the Chinese saying: "A dog chasing game does not mind the fleas which he _barks_ at while he lies in his kennel." "The labour we delight in physics pain."

Again, in all great works of fiction the purpose is, while not o'erstepping the modesty of nature, to show virtue her own feature, and scorn her own image. Who can count the admirers of Scott and Dickens that have learned from their portraitures moral lessons so well as never to forget them;--to loathe the mean and aspire to the noble;--to shun evil and cleave to good--in spite of temptations to one and from the other?

But, after all, our book-treasury will only now and then bestow its best gifts on those who resort to it merely for pleasure. To most visitors of this class it must remain no more than a telescope to a child, something to play with rather than to look through. Accordingly, they no more exhaust the capacities of books than the Irish made full proof of potatoes while they cooked only the balls and left the tubers to rot in the ground.

But the Free Library will be resorted to for _instruction_. Few will always hold the amusing button so close to their eyes that it will hide the instructive sun. From the start it will be superior to every private collection in the city, and its superiority will increase. Accordingly, professional men will come thither to inform themselves either each in his own specialty, or sallying on excursions from their home fields. Besides the time-honoured and traditional three professions, editors and teachers will be there, learning how to answer the hard questions of pupils and subscribers. Each of these professionals will more or less make known what he learns. The bibliothecal odor will be as plain upon them as a certain other odor is upon those who emerge from the smoking-car or saloon. "Dispensing native perfumes they whisper whence they stole those balmy spoils." But the bibliothecal leaven will leaven the community more _directly_.

God has set geniuses as great lights in the firmament to give light and delight as well on the earth. The circuit of such suns is unto the ends of the heaven, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. More and more pervasive is their influence, like the spring-time, which leaves no corner of the land untouched. In a library every man will recognize some supreme author transfiguring whatever he touches,--crystallizing into diamonds by wit, turning to gold with poetry, and glorifying as with tongues of angels by eloquence, and whom he hence worships as Scotchmen do Burns and as all the world does Shakespeare. Less and less do men entertain angels unawares, more and more are they ashamed to know the world's books only by name. Nobody now asks concerning Paradise Lost, "What does it prove?"

Moreover, the Free Library will be patronized by the people in quest of answers to multitudinous questions. Newspapers, whether in its reading-room or out of it, will rouse in many directions a curiosity they cannot satisfy, and so will urge to the library. There is a story that an Englishman in a London library, after looking through an atlas, said to a friend, "Help me find _Umbrage_ on the map! I read in my gazette that the French have taken _Umbrage_. What a good-for-nothing minister is ours--to leave _Umbrage_ so poorly defended that the French could take it." That John Bull discovered in the library either _umbrage_, or what was better for him--his own ignorance and the way to remove it, "taking umbrage" against himself. His gazette probably brought the same earnest inquirer to the library for _history_ as well as for geography. A daily paper, which is the history of the world for one day, leads backward, as a stream carries our thoughts to its fountain. Whoever repairs to a library with one historical query will be likely to repeat his visit, since newspapers, in the light of history, will become more significant as the last chapter in a novel is more interesting to those who have read the previous chapters, and so often leads one back to them. Again, discussions are always arising, not merely in formal debates, but as we sit in the house and walk by the way. Some carry them on by assertions and counter-assertions--a strong will and a strong won't--equally positive and ignorant, discussing and sometimes leaving off the _dis_, till like Milton's devils they find no end, in wandering mazes lost. Too often "It comes to pass that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent twanged off, gives an opinion more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned it." Others back up their opinions by _wagers_, in spite of a lurking feeling that

"Bets are the blockhead's argument,-- The only logic he can vent, His minor and his major.--

'Tis to confess your head a worse Investigator than your purse, To reason with a wager."

But where standard books are at hand, investigation will often either take the place of disputation, or bring strife to a speedy end.

Let us hope those here seeking props for their arguments will never be those jealous lovers of books who cannot use them without using them up, or who spirit them away for themselves alone. Such abductors have sometimes infested the libraries in the Capitol. Their thefts can be justified only by that casuistry which holds stealing the relics of saints for a pious fraud. But in truth the more holy the saint, the more heinous the sacrilege of what Hood calls _Book_-aneering.

Moreover, every _lecture_ delivered in the city will send some investigators to the library, that they may confute, or confirm, or amplify its teachings. A lecture that pops will not be as surely _popular_ as formerly, if the library shall evince that what is true in it is not new, and that what is new is not true, or that the speaker draws on imaginations for facts and on facts for imaginations.

Every meeting of our Women's Centennial Club will start inquiries which cannot be answered without recourse to the library.

It is certain that books of _travel_ will here be largely consulted. Some of us purpose to go abroad. Such will read beforehand in order to add a precious seeing to their eyes. They would dislike to have their experiences those of a lady who when asked what she saw in Rome answered "dirt," or of the London barber who at the coronation of Napoleon remembered nothing except that the Emperor was well shaved, or of the Bostonian fresh from the West who, when called on for his opinion of Madison, said it would be a pretty fair Massachusetts village if it were not spoiled by so many fresh water ponds around it. Others among us have travelled already, and we shall be studious in the library that we may ascertain what we ought to have seen--but did not, or the meaning of what we did see, but which was Greek to us. The Shah of Persia noted in his journal that of all the fine things in Europe the finest to his mind was a show of wax work. His library would teach him better, and would not laugh at him, as we do. A Vermont friend of mine, after his trip to London, when asked whether he saw Westminster Abbey, confessed that he did not, but added that Westminster Abbey was out of town at the time of his visit. If he had free course in our library he would hardly excuse himself in that way again. Soon after crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, I heard a New York merchant, bound for California, remarking: "How much geography one learns in travelling. Here is Burlington. I always thought it in Illinois, but now I find it is in Missouri." Library-reading may by this time have added insight to his sight, and convicted him of the blunder which I suffered to pass uncorrected, though we chatted 100 miles together. There are others of us who, on hearing a traveller's tales, are curious to examine how far we, like the old prophet, should count the way-faring man a fool, and how far he uses his license to lie. Hence they will read that they may make up their minds whether all MARK TWAIN'S caricatures have the ring of truth.

A German table d'hote of twenty courses will surfeit a careless diner before it is half over, and yet fail to afford him either what he likes best or what he should like best. Hence it compels guests to a careful choice what they will partake of and what refuse of the blessing there is no room to receive in its fulness. A similar influence will be exerted by the free library where we fall into the embarassment of riches. We shall be driven to select from its bill of fare, that is the catalogue, that fraction which we can enjoy most and which will profit us most.

"Taste after taste upheld by kindliest change."

Some persons, when they survey a library and perceive that they can never read the hundredth part of its volumes, will be attracted to those works which teach "what to read," or open a panoramic outlook on the diversified regions of the bookish world.

"Of all the best of man's best knowledges, The contents, indexes and title-pages, Through all past, present, and succeeding ages."

Unless we thus liberalize our views we are likely to vegetate, like the rhubarb pie plant, under a barrel, and see the world only through its bunghole. Ignorant of bibliographical guides and hence at a loss how to estimate books, the steward of a British nobleman sold as rubbish all volumes in the library which lacked _covers_. One of those thus disposed of, and bought by a pedlar for nine pence, proved to be the very earliest issue of the British press, snapped up by the British museum for L80, and could not now be bought for ten times that sum. In regard to the _intrinsic_ value of books blunders more egregious are daily made. Libraries were never so needful as now, for libraries and life never lay so close to one another as now. Our familiar sights lead to interest in recondite knowledge. Photography, gas, the locomotive, kerosene, yes, every match that lights it, provokes questions in chemistry, or philosophy, which not every library can answer. No one can gaze at the dome of our Capitol without naturally falling into architectural inquiries which draw him through a world of books that expose the nakedness of his ignorance, yet never put him to open shame. But the truth is too palpable to dwell on that in our day life touches libraries at every point.

In all libraries there are readers whose emblem is dead fish who follow the stream, but thanks to various accidents, some of this class, ceasing to be passive recipients, begin to investigate as active seekers. They at once rise to a higher mental plane. The contrast between active seekers and passive recipients is analogous to that between the mountaineers and the maritime aborigines of California. The mountaineers lived on grizzly bears--food which it was impossible to seize without tasking their energies to the utmost. But tasking trains. The maritimes lived on salmon, which were so abundant and so tame that they could be caught by fishers who lay basking in the sun. But basking enervates. Naturally enough no Indians are superior to the mountaineers who are active seekers, nor yet inferior to the maritimes, who are passive recipients. What investigators seek they will not find at once; they may never find it. But they are sure to discover something better, so that they will say with LESSING, in the library at Wolfenbuttel, "Were God to hold truth in one hand and search in the other, and give me my choice, I would say: Give me seeking without finding, rather than finding without seeking!"

"All things that are, Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed." Courtship once over, the novel ends.

In the library where LESSING was made librarian--not that he might serve the library, but that the library might serve him--I took in my hand with reverence the inkstand out of which he distilled the essence of a thousand books, and reformed German literature as radically as LUTHER had reformed German religion.

All truths being inter-dependent, every road will lead to the end of the world, and so while studying one subject a man becomes interested in others, and his range of inquiry expands. When he kindles one dry stick, many green ones will catch, and his brightest blazes are lit up by unexpected sparks. One quickly learns to love hunting, and before working up many topics, he forms an investigating habit which will perpetuate itself. Thus while seeking an oyster, he finds a pearl, like SAUL who sought asses and found a kingdom. Henceforth he reads more by subjects, each a cord to string pearls on, than by volumes, for he feels that,

"Unless to some particular end designed, Reading is but a specious trifling of the mind, And then, like ill-digested food, To humors turns and not to blood."

But less and less of that sort is his reading, though it range through all time, and tax all the world. Such an inquirer will live longer than METHUSELAH, for he will have more thoughts, yet he will wish each of his minutes was a millenary. He will read with an appetite growing as long as he lives; indeed reading will help him to live longer. A thousand such readers feel what one has spoken out, saying:

"In a library I was thrown, instead of worse society, into the company of poets, philosophers and sages--to me good angels and ministers of grace. From these silent instructors who often do more than fathers for our interests, from these delightful associates I learned something of the divine and more of the human religion. They were my interpreters in the House Beautiful of God, and my guides among the Delectable Mountains of Nature,

Blessing be with them and eternal praise, Who gave me nobler loves and nobler cares."

Pre-eminently to the _young_ will the myriad-minded library be an oracle in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new _key_ to the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they get jack knives they take to whittling. The public schools then find in free libraries their fitting supplement, and complement. Schools without libraries feed a prisoner with salted viands and then tantalize his thirst with pitchers and bottles, all empty. The free school and the free library will join hands like husband and wife in a well-matched marriage.

"He is the half-part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fulness of perfection lies in him; But two such silver currents when they join, Do glorify the banks that bind them in.

Each befits the other, as ALEXANDER said concerning the finest poem and the most costly casket in the world when he enshrined the Iliad in the Persian box of gold and gems. Both are lotteries where tickets cost nothing and everybody may draw all the prizes.

In addition to this, the free library will be to some nothing less than an _inspiration_. _To some_--I wish I could say _to all_, but alas, it is only an "elect few" whom the library can inspire. Spectacles are invaluable,--but only to those who have eyes. One Sultan never wore a shirt that had not every word of the Koran written on it yet absorbed little piety. AARON'S excuse for making only a golden calf was, that the Jews did not bring him gold enough to make an ox. The cherubim who know most can never equal the seraphim who love most. An ugly and stupid man, walking with a lady on each arm, boasts that he is between wit and beauty, but may not imbibe one particle of either.

To some, however, a free library will make up for the lack of a liberal education. More than that. It will furnish such an education every jot and tittle of it, and that, in some sense, better than was ever bestowed in a college, because acquired in the face of greater difficulties. Libraries have often vouchsafed this priceless boon. That in Salem did to BOWDITCH, the mathematician, in the last century, and to WHIPPLE, the essayist, in this. The Edinburgh library made HUME an historian. Another was inspiration to COBBETT. So was that of the Erfurt convent to LUTHER. "It had purchased," says his biographer, "at heavy cost, several Latin Bibles just printed for the first time in the neighboring city of Mainz. When he first opened one of these tomes his eyes fell on the story of HANNAH and SAMUEL. "O, God," he murmured, "could I have one of these books I would seek no other worldly treasure." A great revolution then took place in his soul. His happiest hours were in the library. Concerning such a scholar--

"We cannot say: ''Tis pity He lacks instructions,' for he seems a master To most that teach."

The influence of ancient Libraries on classical writers is manifest from their quotations. PLUTARCH'S have been traced to 250 authors. PLINY'S to 2,000 works. Classical Libraries preserved in Constantinople, so long as studied, made there a Goshen of light in the Dark Ages, and when carried to Italy proved a Promethean spark to kindle occidental culture anew. It is well known that inventions are oftenest struck out in the Patent Office, the grand store-house of inventions. In the world of mind, as well as of matter, new ideas are suggested where old ideas most congregate, or are most communed with. According to CHAUCER,

"Out of old fields, as man saith, Cometh all the new corn from year to year, And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all the new science that men lear."

The idea of writing the "Life of COLUMBUS" first darted into the mind of IRVING, when, in Madrid, he found himself surrounded by an unrivaled magazine of materials made ready to his hand, and for which the world had been ransacked. Thus the sight of means to make good books makes good books made.

Not only those volumes which compose the body of literature, but those finer essences which form its soul,--the literature of power,--stamped in Nature's mint of ecstasy--are marked all over with proofs of familiarity with the best that had been achieved,--each in its own department. Nobody has hesitated thus to affirm concerning VIRGIL, DANTE, TASSO, MILTON. But it is commonly said that SHAKESPEARE was _ignorant_. The truth is that no ignorant man, no ordinary, scholar can understand his allusions, historical, romantic, classical, or those to art, science, nationalities, customs--or even his words. He could get more from a Library in a day than most men in a life-time, but he needed it still.

In speaking of SHAKESPEARE, I mean the man who wrote the Plays reputed his, no matter whether that author was BACON, or JOHN SMITH, or even our townsman GEORGE B.

We ought to say that SHAKESPEARE was a universal man,--because he was heir of all ages,--and his was universal knowledge, a knowledge which neither can we fathom nor could he find without a library.

His peculiarity was ability to discern the immortal part of books, or to stamp what were otherwise perishable with his own immortality. Whoever can do much without tools, can do more with them. Accordingly men do their broken weapons rather use than their bare hands. Whoever can do much without a library, can do more with a library. DAVID did much with a sling, but more with better arms, and builded an armory on which there hung a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

If then there be among us any one person endued with any spark of Shakespearian or other genius he will find it kindling to a flame through contact in this library with similar celestial fires. To such a "meeting soul!" as MILTON calls it,--the library will prove a better bonanza than has been prospected in our States of silver and gold. Though having nothing he shall possess all things,--infinite riches in a little room.

Thus our Free Library will amuse, and instruct, and inspire. Over its entrance I seem to read as on the front of the oldest in the world, the inscription, "The healing of the soul," or the words of FRANKLIN to his namesake town, "I give you books instead of a bell, sense rather than sound." Let it have free course for a generation, calling to culture as ceaselessly as a standing army calls to war, and this community will say with SENECA, "Leisure without books and letters is mental death and burial."

The first public library in Ohio--just two years younger than the State--was founded in Ames. It was bought by hunters who threw together a lot of raccoon skins, sent them in a sleigh by one of their number to Boston and there bartered them for books. They soon hunted Greek as zealously as game, and while Ames remained a hamlet ten of them, or their children, were among the early graduates of the State University.

The influences of a library are _cumulative_, and sometimes become manifest only after a long lapse of ages. The cuniform library of Assyrian bricks, dating from pre-historic periods, burned up, buried and forgotten just now emerges from its grave speaking in a voice heard round the world, and no less authoritative than a second book of Genesis. From its shelves more centuries look down upon us than upon NAPOLEON at the Pyramids.

Libraries are hemmed in by no lines of State, nation, race, language, religion or century. Their field is the world. But ours is the cosmopolitan age, and we are pre-eminently the cosmopolitan people. More than any other people, then must we feel the need of libraries, which are, of all institutions, the most cosmopolitan. Hence they will benefit us most.

Considerations like these demonstrate that free libraries tend to _equality_ and _fraternity_. They are free lunches, crying to all: "Cut, and come again!" As we all have equal rights at the polls and in court, so have we in the free library. In church we each secure a blessing in proportion to our capacity; so can we in the library. In both blessed are they who hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled. In public schools all can enjoy the best of teaching without money and without price; so can they in the free library. Free libraries will create an aristocracy--one open to talent and toil, but to nothing else; the aristocracy of knowledge. Where street cars have been introduced, half the private carriages are soon given up, so the establishment of free libraries will lead many to refrain from large domestic collections as superfluous, and to the transfer of many a private library to the public shelves, where they will not only do more good, but will be better cared for, better arranged, and more accessible than they now are even to their owners. One millionaire as we walked into his library, said with a sigh: "See how many gaps there are in my shelves! Five hundred of my books are missing, lent and lost." "Lost!" cried I, half in joke, "say rather found! lost to you, but found each by some one who will make the most of them. Would to heaven these 5,000 were lost in the same way, lost by you who have no time nor care for them, found by those who have both. Nobody could steal them from you, but at most only from moths and worms, dust and mould." Rich men who have bought libraries as luxuries will learn that the way to save them is to lose them, and that their books serve them best when deposited in free libraries.

Many varieties of _sham_ equality result from outside pressure. In Venetian gondolas all awnings are required to be black that no one may outshine his neighbor. Under the first republic the French proscribed all titles but citizen, and citizeness, which they gave to everybody. Communists would make all men's shares in property equal. Endeavors of this sort not only fail, but prove suicidal like the impetuous Irishman, insisting that one man is as good as another, and _a great dey better too_. The influence of Free Libraries, however is toward genuine and not merely visible equality. Thanks to them the most expensive luxury of the rich becomes the daily food of the poor, and the tree of knowledge no more bears forbidden fruit. A volume which I can draw out of a library at will is worth as much to me as if I owned it. In fact, though my private library is not small, the books I read are more often borrowed than my own.

If I take out books from a library, I am doubly spurred to to make their contents my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what book we borrow.

FRANKLIN tells us that "he often sat up reading, the greater part of the night, when a book borrowed (he means _stolen_) from booksellers in the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found missing." In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become alike _inside_, in real communion with great authors, in information, taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,--accomplishments which cannot be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his fellows. Men will still differ by God, not by man. What then is the Free Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?

When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing. But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and say; "These are our jewels." Not tombs, but living shrines that on the living still work miracles,--the shrines where all the relics of the saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the dumb speak--the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is

"Made porous to receive And drink the liquid light, firm to retain Its gathered beams, great palace now of light, Hither as to a fountain countless stars Repairing in their golden urns draw light."

Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and University parks are without.

A library,--the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;--reminds me of that fresco by RAPHAEL, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces, popularly styled "The School of Athens," and which I hope to see hung up as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical man, like FRANKLIN'S Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. SOCRATES, with sly humor, is humbling the self-sufficient ALCIBIADES that he may rouse him to loftier aspirations. PYTHAGORAS is writing among disciples, one of whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the temple, appear ARISTOTLE, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to the earth, and PLATO, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for God. The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as RAPHAEL painted--and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,--which is well said to unite clustered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars.

"Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime."

THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

This section, devoted to the general relations of the library and society, which opened with a historical account by Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, may appropriately close with another of similar tenor, contributed eleven years later to _The American Magazine of Civics_ (New York, May, 1895) by Prof. Henry H. Barber. It covers some of the same ground but gives results to a later date, while it is still only introductory to the social development of more recent years.

Henry Hervey Barber was born in Warwick, Mass., Dec. 30, 1835, graduated at Meadville Theological Seminary in 1861 and after holding several Unitarian pastorates was professor of philosophy and theology there from 1884 to 1904. He was also editor of the Unitarian Review from 1875 to 1884. He died about 1915.

No public institution has made greater progress during the last few years or grown more rapidly in public interest and favor than the free public library. The building of a magnificent structure in Chicago, together with the excellent Newberry free reference library, and in cooperation with the fast growing library of the Chicago University, will make perhaps the most superb public provision for free literary culture ever furnished by any municipality. Boston has lately transferred its more than half a million volumes to the new and noble public library building on the Back Bay. The newspapers of this last week tell us that in New York Mr. Tilden is after all not to be finally counted out; but that the two millions rescued from his estate by the high sense of honor of one of his heirs is to be joined with the invaluable Astor Library, and the choice Lennox Reference Library, and all made free and available to the public--a property valued in the aggregate at eight million dollars. These events, together with the recent founding of the Carnegie free libraries in Pittsburg and Allegheny, the not very remote establishment of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and the addition by Mr. Henry C. Lea to the splendid Ridgway foundation in Philadelphia, constitute a series of brilliant triumphs for the free public library, unparalleled in the history of educational institutions, and seldom equalled, I must think, in the intellectual progress of civilization.

Nor do these metropolitan successes indicate, after all, the most essential advance. The frequency with which private beneficence is coming to the aid of public enterprise in smaller cities and country towns, for the establishment and increase of these libraries; the recent notable instances of stimulative auxiliary legislation; and the growth of intelligent interest in new and widely scattered sections of the civilized world, are equally significant, and perhaps even more widely beneficent. It is the era of the free public library; and it is of special interest to us to see that our community and our commonwealth are moving in accord with this tide of new feeling and enterprise concerning it.

Of special interest, I say, to us as Pennsylvanians; for we are glad to remember that it is here that the first impulse was given to the foundation of the system of circulating libraries, the development of which is the free public library in England and America. Benjamin Franklin, after considerable effort, founded in 1732 the Philadelphia Library Company, the "mother," as he himself calls it, "of all the subscription libraries in North America."

This library which Franklin started for the advantage of himself and his fifty young business associates, in the early time, when, as he says, "there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston," and when most of the books had to be imported from England, was followed soon by the establishment of more ambitious similar libraries in Newport (1747) and Hartford (1774); and later in many other places in England and this country. These were called public libraries, though books could only be taken out by subscribers. Probably, however, as in Philadelphia, the librarian could "permit any civil gentlemen to peruse the books of the library in the library room."

But it was in the formation of many so-called "Social Libraries" in the smaller cities and country towns of New England and the Middle States, early in the present century, that the foundations of the free municipal library were laid. These subscription libraries, in their growth and in their decay, no less than in the appetite for books they developed, created a demand and at length a necessity for public provision for what had come to be one of the prime intellectual needs of many communities.

Meantime in Scotland, in 1816, Samuel Brown of Haddington, following in part the methods of London booksellers, established a system of free itinerating libraries, loaning without cost selections of fifty books in each package to villages and neighborhoods that would engage to circulate and take proper care of them. At the end of two years each loan was called in, and another of different works sent in its place. This scheme was for many years highly successful, and doubtless highly useful; but seems to have failed soon after the death of its projector and inspirer in 1839. The system had the earnest sanction of Lord Brougham, and about 1825 was taken up in some parts of England; and, in a modified form, has had a great success in Melbourne and its neighborhood, in Australia. Stanley Jevons, whose article on the rationale of free public libraries in his "Methods of Social Reform" is one of the most interesting and valuable contributions to the literature of this subject, commends it as the best form of extending free public libraries in the rural portions of Great Britain, and he estimates that there ought to be three thousand such literary itinerants in England and Wales.

This system was copied in this country in the School District Libraries which were started in the state of New York in 1835, and a few years afterward were in successful operation in Massachusetts and other New England states, and in Michigan and Ohio at least, among states further west. At first every school district raising thirty dollars the first year and ten dollars thereafter, by tax or subscription, was assisted by the state--I cite the Massachusetts statute--to a like sum; and a small but choice selection of books sent to it for free circulation within the district. A little later Massachusetts, at least, removed this condition; and supplied every school district with such a library. These libraries after remaining in use for a while, and generally being thoroughly read, were exchanged among the districts. New books were thus continually coming to new readers. This movement was earnestly forwarded by that pioneer among American educators, Horace Mann, and during the period of my boyhood was a godsend to the young people of New England. I want to bless the memory of Samuel Brown, Father Page (a pioneer of the system in New York), and Horace Mann for the gleams of literary light thus cast across the bookless darkness of New England rural homes forty to fifty years ago. This highly economical missionary agency of general intelligence passed away in New England with the incoming of the more satisfactory town system of free libraries. The cause of its decadence elsewhere is not clear, but it has lately had a remarkable resurrection in New York, as we soon shall see.

The first free town library in America, or the world, supported by municipal taxation, was established by the efforts of Abiel Abbot, D.D., in Peterboro, New Hampshire, in 1833. A decayed social library and an operatives' library, and perhaps some other small collections, were thus gathered under the shelter of the town; and took on new life from its fostering care, and the small annual appropriation for new books which is the breath of life to all libraries. Here, as always, it was _a man_ that inspired the advance movement and carried it on to successful fulfilment.

In 1849, New Hampshire passed a general law enabling towns and cities to maintain free libraries by taxation; and in 1851 Massachusetts, which had granted Boston in 1847 the right to establish such a library, passed a similar general enabling act. Several other states followed almost immediately, and nearly every northern and northwestern state, except Pennsylvania, has since adopted the measure. In 1893, twenty states had enacted similar statutes; and, in all, more than seven hundred free libraries have been established under them. They have increased--as might naturally have been expected--most rapidly in the portions of the country where other library agencies, and where an efficient public school system, have been longest and most efficiently at work. Thus, of the seven hundred libraries, more than three hundred are in Massachusetts (according to the returns of the Public Library Commission for 1894), or 1,233 volumes for every thousand of population; in New Hampshire something over one hundred (in 1894), or 464 volumes per thousand of inhabitants.

Great Britain has kept nearly equal pace with our foremost states in free library legislation. A general enabling act to establish and support free libraries for the people from municipal rates was passed by Parliament in 1850, and accepted with great energy and enthusiasm by many of the northern towns and cities. Eighty-six free libraries, not including branches, had been opened before 1880; but, as in this country, the conservatism of the southern portions of the country has prevented their general establishment. For similar reasons only the province of Ontario has made any considerable movement in this direction in the Dominion of Canada.

This hasty historical sketch would be very incomplete without some account of the recent legislation, in several states, for the assistance of the smaller towns and villages in the establishment and increase of public libraries. This legislation has already had marvelous results. Massachusetts, in 1890, appropriated one hundred dollars to any town that would raise by taxation, or appropriate from the dog tax, or otherwise raise, at least fifty dollars (or if its valuation was less than one million dollars it should raise twenty-five dollars, or if less than $250,000 it should raise at least fifteen dollars); and should agree to take care of the books, and furnish the agency of distribution. The sums granted by the state are in the hands of a board of commissioners appointed by the governor (with the advice and consent of the council); and so far these commissioners--librarians and others--have been eminent citizens, serving without salaries, and having only $500 in their hands annually for clerk hire and traveling expenses. The commission is also required to give advice and information to librarians and others concerning selection of books, cataloguing, and administration; and to select and forward the books granted by the state.

Now for results. The commission has thus aided in establishing, in four years, more than sixty free public libraries in small towns (out of one hundred and four not thus supplied) and its action has shamed a few larger towns into establishing them; so that now only two and three fourths per cent of the population of the state, in forty-four small towns, were in January, 1894, without their advantages. And this has been accomplished with an entire expense to the commonwealth of less than ten thousand dollars. _Per contra_, more than half a million dollars were given by individuals in a single year for similar purposes within the state. Certainly, this has been a most economical and effective public outlay; free, too, from all suspicion of any one's fattening by political jobbery.

The record of New Hampshire is even more remarkable. This state passed a law in 1891, similar to the one outlined above, and over eighty towns accepted its provisions, and established free libraries within a twelvemonth after it came in force. We are glad to read that the states of Maine, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania are moving in the direction of a measure that has proved so effective in its operation, and that must be so widely beneficent.

The state of New York has adopted another system to stimulate the development of the free library. Her enabling act of many years ago produced, as we have seen, comparatively small results; and in 1892 a law was passed authorizing the Regents of the University of New York to lend for a limited time--usually six months--selections of books from the duplicate department of the state library, or from books purchased for the purpose, to any public library in the state; or, where none exists, to twenty-five petitioners in any town or village of the state. A fee of five dollars is required, to cover cost of transportation, catalogue, etc., for a loan of one hundred volumes, and a smaller sum (three dollars) for a loan of fifty volumes. This plan, it will be seen, is a revival of the old school district method; and of that instituted by Samuel Brown in Scotland, and the later one found successful in Australia. The antipodes have a fashion lately of suggesting valuable object-lessons for social legislation. In small communities it has the advantage of making books do manifold duty, and of meeting the wants of varied communities and occupations. By judicious and varied selection, clubs, classes, schools, and reading circles may be aided in special courses and investigations. At the end of twenty months one hundred and twenty-five of these free loan libraries had been sent out by the New York Board of Regents; of which nearly one half (44) went to communities without public libraries, the remainder going to libraries already established (22), to university extension centers (18), and to academy libraries open to the public (22). Eleven thousand nine hundred volumes were thus made accessible to the public, with a total circulation of not far from 25,000 volumes and 9,000 readers. This system, which seems even more economical than the Massachusetts one, has greatly promoted interest in good reading, and led to the establishment of several local public libraries. The system is very elastic and is easily adapted to the rapidly growing demands for its privileges. As a pioneer method, or as auxiliary to municipal libraries, it promises excellent results.

After this historical survey it would hardly seem necessary to dwell upon the arguments in behalf of the free public library. "There is probably no mode of expending public money," says Stanley Jevons, "which gives a more extraordinary and immediate return in utility and innocent enjoyment." He affirms that in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and some other great towns in England, as in similar communities in this country, where such libraries have existed for years, there is but one opinion about them. "They are classed with town-halls, police courts, prisons, and poorhouses as necessary adjuncts of our stage of civilization." A more natural, and certainly more cheerful, collocation would class them with free schools, museums, and public parks, as Jevons himself afterwards suggests. "The main _raison d'etre_ of free public libraries, as indeed of public museums, art galleries, parks, halls, public clocks, and many other kinds of public works, is the enormous increase of utility which is thereby acquired for the community at a trifling cost." He proceeds to illustrate by several instances what he calls "the remarkable multiplication of utility" in the case of free lending libraries by several instances. Every book, in the first year of the Birmingham Free Library, was issued on an average seventeen times, and the periodical literature turned over fifty times. In Leeds, every book was used eighteen times. In larger libraries and in later use, of course, the figures are less, averaging from three to ten times, the whole cost of each issue averaging only from two to five cents. Similar statistics may be found in the _Forum_ article already referred to in regard to the manifold use of books furnished in New York.

The comfort and moral economy of a cheerful, well-lighted reading-room, too, is overwhelmingly illustrated. Mr. Jevons found that in Manchester all persons of suitable age visited the free libraries on an average thirteen times a year, of whom three fourths came to read in the reading-rooms. Such a refuge from the perils of the saloon and the street is an immense benefaction in any neighborhood.

The relative cheapness of securing this means of general culture and enjoyment, this efficient antidote to vice and ignorance, is strikingly shown by comparing its cost with other items of governmental expenditure, and the statistics of national luxuries and vices. The eighty-six free libraries in the large cities of Great Britain cost not more than half a million dollars per year--one fifth the cost of a first class ironclad. The statistics I have given show that the cost of the two war vessels just voted by Congress might be abundantly sufficient to insure the organization on the Massachusetts plan of a free library in every village and country town of the United States, not now accessible to such a library. The expenditure for drink, for horse-racing, or even for tobacco, for a single year, would royally equip and endow a public library for every thousand people now without such privileges. As post-office savings banks are, wherever established, a mighty engine for teaching thrift, as public parks are an incalculable source of health and enjoyment in our cities, so the public library, "the free literary park," as Jevons calls it, is a most effective agency for the promotion of culture and civilization.

In the year 1851, George Ticknor, the distinguished author of the "History of Spanish Literature" and a benefactor of the Boston Public Library, wrote to Edward Everett: "I would establish a library which differs from all free libraries yet attempted; I mean one in which any popular books tending to moral and intellectual improvement shall be furnished in such numbers that many persons can be reading the same book at the same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the pleasant literature of the day, shall be made accessible to the whole people when they most care for it--that is, when it is fresh and new. I would thus by following the popular taste--unless it should demand something injurious--create a real appetite for healthy reading. This appetite once formed will take care of itself. It will in a great majority of cases demand better and better books."

Mr. Everett's conservatism doubted the wisdom of these principles for the foundation of a library: but they are essentially those which have proved sound in the free library system of England and New England, of Australia and the Northwestern cities. In the light of fifty years' experience, indeed, Everett's skepticism reads like Governor Berkeley's report on education in Virginia, in which he thanked God that there were no free schools in Virginia and hoped that there would be none for a hundred years. The communities in which libraries, approaching George Ticknor's ideal, have been longest established, would do without paved streets or electric lights sooner than without these libraries, and they support them by taxation as cheerfully as the public schools. Indeed, the free library in not a few communities is reckoned an invaluable and indispensable adjunct of the public school, the very crown of the system of popular education. Such librarians as Green of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Whitney of Watertown, and Hosmer of Minneapolis, keep in touch with the work of the schools, and apprize the various classes of pupils of new books especially valuable for their work. More than this, they have regard to the needs of the various clubs, trades, and professions, and keep their members aware of valuable books in their special departments. But perhaps the most helpful service of all is rendered by capable librarians in the constant advice given to inexperienced readers, and the frequent bulletins sent out to stimulate the interest and instruct the intelligence of the community. It is of special interest to note that the demand for good reading has been greatly increased wherever the public library has been administered in this way. Indeed, booksellers and proprietary libraries have come to favor the opening of the free library as largely increasing the demand for their books.

It is not strange that with this large and various capacity of social service, the free library should be rapidly growing in public favor; nor that private munificence should frequently come to the municipal provision. There is no public object for which so generous gifts are often made. In the year 1893, for instance, five hundred thousand dollars were contributed to public libraries and the erection of library buildings in Massachusetts alone. "There has been ready perception," says Fletcher in his "Public Libraries in America," "of the truth that one's memory cannot better be perpetuated than by association with an institution so popular and at the same time so elevating and refining as the public library. Memorial libraries are therefore very abundant, and as expense has not been spared in the erection of such memorials, many of our towns, even the smaller ones, are ornamented by library buildings which are gems of architecture.... The fact remains, with all its significance, that about the public library cluster naturally the affections and the interest of the community. In its endowment, on the one hand by private beneficence, and on the other by public taxation, is illustrated that collaboration of the rich and the poor in the pursuit of the highest ends which has in it the promise, and perhaps the potency, of the solution of vexing social questions."

The remembrance that these statements are only locally accepted, and that large portions of England and the United States have hardly moved toward the establishment of public libraries, may prompt a consideration of certain objections which are still sometimes urged. Civilization accepts its most benignant and effective agencies of progress only under protest; and it is not, therefore, wholly inexplicable that fifty years of unmixed and increasing success should have left some excellent and otherwise intelligent people unconvinced of the beneficence of the free public library. A friend of mine was enthusiastically setting forth the advantages of such libraries, and their rapid multiplication and growing service in New England, at the dinner table of one of the most distinguished, philosophic, and progressive of contemporary Englishmen; and was not a little surprised to be cut short with the decided comment, "I do not believe in it." The Englishman's fastidious preference for high fences and compartment railway carriages pervades all his intellectual conceptions also; and makes him impervious even to Stanley Jevons's overwhelming demonstration of the moral, social, and economic utility of the free public library; impervious even to the appeal that ignorance and narrow intellectual opportunity must be supposed to make upon enlightened philanthropy.

Mr. Herbert Spencer and the individualists oppose to the public library, supported by taxation, their wellworn declamation about the injustice of making one man pay for another man's culture and amusement; and urge the dictum of _laissez faire_ in civilization and government. But as the post-office and the public school have survived their onslaughts we may not feel compelled to surrender the advantages of the free library. For, as with the school, it is easy to show that mental health and light are as primary interests of the community as material; and that it is precisely because those most deficient are least sensible of their defect that society must seek to remedy it. Mr. Spencer's analogy between hunger for food and hunger for knowledge is utterly fallacious. The physical appetite may be trusted to seek vigorously its own supply; the intellectual appetite has most to be aroused where intellectual starvation is most imminent; and it grows only by what it feeds on. Men usually value most, indeed, what they work or pay for; but it is precisely those who do not value good books at all who need to be tempted and trained to their appreciation. And it is just the children of those whose parents will not, or cannot, provide them wholesome reading, that society cannot afford to let go wholly unprovided.

The smallest fee here proves an effective bar, as the experience of all subscription libraries proves. When the Springfield (Mass.) library was made free, its circulation was trebled the first year--though the fee had been only one dollar--and in a few years rose six or seven fold. "The Mercantile Library of Peoria, Ill.," says Mr. Crunden, "turned over to the city and made free, notes an increase in ten years, of members from two hundred and seventy-five to four thousand five hundred, and of issues from fifteen thousand to ninety thousand." So always. If the dollar fee were removed from the circulation of the books of our Meadville City Library, for instance, within five years they would go into fifteen hundred families instead of less than three hundred, as now; and the added twelve hundred families would be the very ones where the books would be of highest service. And, perhaps, more beneficent still would be the influence upon the vastly larger number who would frequent the library, and grow intelligent through the multiplied use of its reading facilities, and the help of its valuable reference department. The reaction upon the general intelligence of the community would make itself felt in the increasing intelligence of its working men and the higher standard of life this would bring among them. In short, it would insure economic progress.

Besides the economic advantages, and much more important, the influence of a well-furnished free library would tell in the training of citizens. The discussion of economic and social questions, eager and often bitter as it is, would become less crude and partisan in the knowledge of the best books and magazine articles upon the topics involved. The reading of history, biography, and travels would exert a broadening, enlightening, and often inspiring influence. To make wholesome literature more accessible than dime novels would save many boys and girls from ruin, rouse many dormant intellects to higher life, and supply effective rivals to the saloons and other low resorts. Philanthropy and religion alike demand the wide opening of such an "effectual door" to the opportunities of the higher life.

It is sometimes objected that the records of all public libraries show that the lightest literature is most read, that fiction constitutes one half or three fourths of the books circulated. But besides the obvious consideration that only wholesome fiction finds place in all well-appointed public libraries, Horace Greeley's view has much to commend it, viz.: that all pure reading, however light, tends to develop a taste for more vigorous and instructive literature. Besides, it may well be urged that fiction is not only the current form of literary art, but also the effective vehicle of current social theories, philanthropies, and reforms; and that much of the most earnest thinking and serious moral purpose of this age is embodied in it. Under such intelligent and careful selection as the public opinion of the community may provide for, the public library will furnish a healthful substitute and corrective for the unappointed and vagrant reading of that large section of young people most in need of guidance.

I have left myself but a moment to suggest one or two practical questions that may need consideration in the establishment of a new system of free public libraries in communities or a commonwealth. Next to thorough discussion of their proved beneficence, an efficient enabling act is certainly the first desideratum, in any state still without it, so that towns and cities may tax themselves for this purpose. And it is most important that this act be not so narrowly limited that communities shall be unable to attempt anything worth while. Better wait five years, or ten years, more for the statute that will enable our communities to put themselves in line with the most advanced in the country in this respect, than to enact a starveling and ineffective statute that shall

"Keep the word of promise in our ear, And break it to our hope,"

as has already sometimes happened. The public appropriation is so limited by penny-wise legislation in a number of states as to discourage all action, and kill all interest in the matter.

In the same way, it is to be hoped that these states will accompany their enabling acts by auxiliary legislation similar to that in Massachusetts and New Hampshire; or, perhaps still better, patterned upon that of New York. It is difficult to decide upon the comparative advantages of these two systems. That of Massachusetts seems to me better for permanent results; but that of New York seems likely to be more immediately effective in stirring the sluggish interest of indifferent communities. Both are wonderfully economical in money, and both have great effectiveness when worked by the intelligent interest of even a few enthusiastic friends of the free library movement in any community. It would seem that even a governor who thinks five million people cannot afford $25,000 for the "Birds of Pennsylvania" might consent to spend a fifth of that sum per year to begin a work that would not end, if once well begun, without putting a new and most effective agency of social culture and even economic progress within the reach of every boy and girl in the state.

The machinery through which to plan and begin this great and hopeful experiment should be carefully considered. Massachusetts's unsalaried commission of eminent citizens, New York's Board of University Regents, alike insure that in those commonwealths the work will be carried on under the most hopeful and efficient conditions. Some such unpartisan and public-spirited agency is absolutely demanded for the success of the movement in a state that has to begin it _de novo_; and the _personnel_ of the agency is the most important point in any legislation initiating it.

There is also a difference of opinion as to whether school boards, or boards specially constituted for the purpose, should have charge of public libraries. My opinion is decidedly in favor of the latter; for while school boards would bring the library, as is most desirable, into closer relation with the public schools, an independent board, chosen, perhaps, by the school board in connection with the city council, as sometimes in Massachusetts, would be likely to bring more ability, independence, and careful consideration to the affairs of the library, and to separate it more completely from injurious partisan and personal politics.

THE COMMUNITY'S SERVICE TO THE LIBRARY

The Public Library, like the Public School, is the creature of the community, which owes it provision for keeping it in condition to render the service for which it was created. This duty of course, includes adequate financial support but does not end here. Among the most important adjuncts to such support are the aid that can be given by enlightened public opinion and by organized groups in the maintenance of liberal and helpful policies, and the appointment of a governing board equally conscious of its responsibilities and its limitations.

THE RELATION OF THE STATE TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

This statement of first principles was made by Melvil Dewey at the Second International Library Conference, held in London, July 13-16, 1897, and is reprinted from the Transactions and Proceedings of the Conference (London, 1898). In reading this address, it must be kept in mind that it was made to Englishmen, whose conception of the functions of a public library were then, as now, much more conservative than ours. A sketch of Dr. Dewey will be found in Vol. I. of this series.

We have been listening to an admirable account of the development of the library movement from earliest times to the present day, and I venture to believe that when the history of the age in which we live is written, and is looked back upon by those who shall come after, it will be known distinctively as the "Library Age."

Libraries of one sort or another have existed from the beginning of human history, and we are now well into the fifth century since the invention of printing; so that it would seem as if there had been abundant time for library development. But so great an institution as the modern library is of slow growth. It has taken a thousand years to develop our school system from university down to kindergarten. The public library is much more rapidly going through corresponding stages in order to come to its own. The original library was a reservoir, getting in and keeping safely, a storehouse for posterity. That was and is a great function, for which I have profound respect. Then, after many centuries, came another library epoch, for which we all feel still greater respect. The cistern was made a fountain; giving out was seen to be more important than getting in. The library is no longer merely a passive receptacle, but becomes an aggressive educational force in every community. The reservoir will not become a stagnant pool, for, in its branches and deliveries, the public library has mains and pipes laid through every street, and reaching almost to the door of every householder. And we live now not in the age of the reservoir, but in the age of the fountain. In our zeal and admiration, however, we are apt to forget that there is yet another and even more important stage to reach. In my own city, some time ago, we spent half a million dollars in providing an ample supply of water. But we found that we had really opened convenient communication with the cemetery by water, for the quality of the new and abundant beverage was such that our death-rate steadily rose. The burning question became qualitative, not quantitative, and we are now spending our money on efficient filtration. Of course no library intends to circulate injurious books, but equally no town intends to distribute harmful water. We are concerned more with the results than with the intention. The mortality tables make plain the physical defect, but alas! science has as yet devised no instruments delicate enough to record the greater danger to the individual and the State from poison in the great current, which has come to be a mighty flood, of modern reading matter. The most hopeful, and perhaps the only practicable, method of guarding against this serious danger is through the public library, which must now in the last days of this eventful century recognise the gravity of the new responsibility which it cannot shirk. Before another audience I might dwell at length on what this problem of selection means, but the representative librarians of the world will understand my claim that, wonderful as was the development from the cistern to the fountain, its importance is overshadowed by this great question of excluding the pernicious, which I sum up in the word filtration. This is the great problem of the modern library, and its solution must depend largely on the State.

It is often said that the modern periodicals and newspapers are our greatest danger; but this, of course, is true only of the sensational and other objectionable types. I yield to none in my high appreciation of what the best kind of newspaper may do in its capacity as the strongest ally of the public library and of the public school. I am confident that early in the next century such journals will be recognised as a distinct part of our educational machinery, but I am equally clear that the worst journals, conducted merely as money-making enterprises, and catering to the worst instead of to the best elements of both society and individuals, are the most potent factors for evil, and the greatest enemy which the ideal librarian has to combat in carrying forward his best work. They leave their habitual readers with neither time nor taste for anything above their own low plane. The mind will inevitably rise or fall to the level of its habitual reading, and we apostles and missionaries of the book have no more disheartening outlook than on the readers whose literary atmosphere is limited to the modern sensational newspapers. But the apologists for such reading say that the history of their own times is of more importance to them than any other history; should they not, therefore, become as familiar as possible with it? But when a man, on account of "pressure of business," never looks inside any good book, yet has time to read everything in the newspapers, he is--well, specialising too much in "history." How many men and women there are, who, from year's end to year's end, read nothing but the so-called history of their own times, and who can tell you nothing better than which dog won the last fight! It is a good thing to know the history of our own times; so is a pinch of salt a good thing on one's breakfast potato, but it is not necessary to drink a barrel of sea water each morning in order to get it.

It is highly desirable that I should know the geology and topography of my own State, but I can learn all that is worth knowing without creeping on hands and knees with nose close to the ground over the barnyards and dump heaps of our commonwealth, under the vain delusion that I am exhaustively studying its geology. We must join this battle squarely. The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on. The librarian must be the librarian militant before he can be the librarian triumphant. At the end of another century, when a conference like this is held, our descendants will look back with wonder to find that we have so long been satisfied to leave the control of the all-pervading, all-influencing newspaper in the hands of people who have behind them no motive better than the "almighty dollar." The solution of our difficulties lies in recognition by the State that public libraries are not only good things, but that they are an absolutely necessary part of our educational system. We started with the university, but found that we had to put under it the college. Then we went a step further, and had the academy and high school to prepare for the college; the primary and grammar schools to prepare for the high school; and now we have the kindergarten under the primary school. I am not giving a chronology, but simply pointing out that during these centuries educators have constantly been facing the question of adequate provision for meeting completely the public wants. We have at last reached step by step from the university to the nursery, and have provided a series of schools covering the entire field. Yet, with all this, we have not attained the full system of education that we ought to attain, and every thoughtful person is now asking, "What next?"

Huxley has well said that a system of education which in the early years trains boys and girls to read and then makes no provision for what they shall read during all the rest of their lives, would be as senseless as to teach our children the expert use of the knife, fork, and spoon, and then make no provision for their daily food. The whole history of education has been a series of broadening conceptions. I can recall no case in which the ideal has narrowed, but step by step we have come to a general recognition that education is for poor as well as rich, for plebeian as well as prince, for black and white, for native and foreigner, for brilliant or backward, for women as well as men, for deaf, dumb, and blind, and all defectives and delinquents, who in the old conception were left without the pale. It is almost within our memory that we have come to substantial agreement that the State owes an elementary education to every boy and girl born within its limits, not alone as a right to the child, but as a matter of safety and practical wisdom on the part of the State; and this broader conception is followed closely by a second and still broader one, that every boy and girl is entitled not only to an elementary, but to something also of higher education. I have met no competent student of this subject who dares deny that hereafter the State must recognize that education is not alone for the young, for limited courses, in schools which take all the time of their pupils, but that it must regard adults as well; and not alone for short courses, but all through life--not in our recognised teaching institutions alone, but in that study outside of office or working hours that may be carried on at home. I may sum it up in the one sentence, "Higher education, for adults, at home, through life."

In this home education, which must hereafter be recognised side by side with school education, the library is the great central agent round which study clubs, reading circles, extension teaching, museums, and the other allied agencies must cluster. A statesman solicitous for the future welfare of his country will find his most fruitful field in protecting and guiding the reading of the people. It is what a man reads that shapes his future, which depends, not at once upon the rostrum and the pulpit, but on the book and the newspaper. In education we recognise that the supreme end is the building of character, but many of us have never thought clearly how directly this character-building rests upon the public library. It is reading that begets reflection, reflection begets motive, motive begets action, and action begets habit, and habit begets character; and who here dares question this, that it is not the air nor the water, nor yet the "roast beef of Old England," not its history nor traditions nor laws nor geographic location, but _character_, that has made the Anglo-Saxons, England and her daughters across the seas, the most wonderful people of the earth. It is not brawn, but brain. The dogs and horses might have the physical qualities, but it is the mind and soul, and those elements of true greatness which can best be instilled into a people through the reading of good and great books, that have made a race of which we are justly all so proud. One of the wisest of Frenchmen said of the Franco-Prussian War, when the needle-gun was suggested as the explanation of German victory, "No; it was not the needle-gun, nor the German soldier who held it, nor yet the German schoolmaster who trained the soldier, but it was the German university that made the schoolmaster."

"Knowledge is power," and it is knowledge that has made England and America great. Think of the men who read the poorest newspapers, but know nothing of our best books. Can the State afford to make other things free, and not make free true and useful knowledge as preserved in books? Can the State recognize the necessity for free schools, and fail to provide free access to the best reading in all realms of knowledge?

"Free as air," was the old-time strongest expression. Then men learned how absolutely essential to physical well-being was abundance of water, and our language records in its favourite expression, "free as water," the meaning of the untold millions that civilization has spent to supply all people freely with this essential. We are learning the greater lesson about the necessity of free knowledge more slowly, because intellectual and spiritual things are not so readily discerned by our mortal eyes, and it takes more time to read even those messages that God has written very large for those who have eyes to see; but the time is not far distant, mark my words, when our speech will again record the general acceptance of a great truth in the common phrase, as "free as knowledge." We should make the public understand the relation of the school system to the library system; that the library is not merely a collection of books, or a storehouse, but an aggressive and active source of education, side by side with the free schools. If the issue came--but, thank God, it never will--between giving up either the library or the free school, I am not sure that I would not choose for the welfare of the country the public library rather than the school. This may sound strange from one who has given his life to education, but I believe that even without our schools nearly every boy and girl would somehow learn to read; and when I soberly consider the influence on lives and characters and on the State, it seems probable that, infinitely valuable as is the work of our free schools, it would be exceeded by what could be done by a system of free public libraries, reaching every boy and girl and man and woman in the community, and so administered as to provide each freely from childhood to the grave with the best reading in every field of interest and activity.

The State, whatever it may or may not do, should recognise the library as being as essential to public welfare as is the school, and it should give it as careful protection from dangers without and within as it gives to institutions like banks and insurance companies. The State should protect the library against unjust laws, improper interference, or pernicious influence of any kind from without. It should guard it also against misconduct, incapacity, or neglect on the part of its trustees, officers, or employees. Beside the direct appropriations for its support, it should grant the most liberal powers for holding property given by individuals for the public benefit, and, above all, should grant entire exemption from taxation. To tax a free public library for doing its beneficent work is theorising gone mad. It is as absurd as for a missionary to refuse admission to his preaching, or for the manager of a theatre in which a fire has just started to shut out every fireman till he had presented the conventional coupon for a reserved seat. The example first set by my own State (New York) in the statute which I had the honour of drawing ought to be followed universally. We created a public libraries department, to devote its entire attention to advancing the best interests of public libraries. It would take the entire morning to sketch to you the various forms of beneficent work which we have found practicable. We help to establish new libraries, reorganise old ones, revise methods, select books, lend single books or entire libraries, grant books or money up to $200 yearly to any library raising an equal sum from local sources, and, by means of correspondence, personal inspection, and steady work in a dozen directions, help every community to get the greatest practical good from the labour and money given to its free library. We have now about five hundred travelling libraries moving about in all parts of the State. The public library is rapidly becoming universal. For the Government not to recognise it in its own organisation is as absurd as it would be to have a standing army and no war department, or schools dotted all about the state and no department of education. Time forbids more than the mere naming of what is needed, but the first great step in summing up the relation of the State to public libraries is the establishment of a public libraries department, in charge of a strong man who appreciates the almost limitless opportunities for usefulness which this new field affords.

Our discussions this morning took such a turn that you could almost hear behind them, like the recurring motive of one of Wagner's operas, the question, "Who shall be greatest among librarians?" In our State Library School I give each year a course of five lectures on the qualifications of a librarian, and point out under a half-hundred different heads the things we should demand in an ideal librarian; but when we have covered the whole field of scholarship and technical knowledge and training, we must confess that overshadowing all are the qualities of the man. To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. He must have a head as clear as the master in diplomacy; a hand as strong as he who quells the raging mob, or leads great armies on to victory; and a heart as great as he who, to save others, will, if need be, lay down his life. Such shall be greatest among librarians; and, when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who will achieve this greatness will be women.

It is well to hold up high ideals, but it would be a sad mistake to underrate the services of the noble men and women who in some, perhaps many, respects fall far short of the standards we lay down, and yet who have done, and are doing well, much of the world's best work. Let us dwell on what has been well done, not on what has been omitted or on what might have been done by other men in other circumstances.

I remember, some twenty-five years ago, reading in George Eliot's _Romola_ these words, which we should remember when thinking of any great librarian who of necessity fails in some respects to meet all our ideals: "It was the fashion of old, when an ox was led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots and give the offering a false show of unblemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk, and boldly say the victim was spotted; but it was not therefore in vain that his mighty heart was laid on the altar of men's highest hopes."

METHODS OF SECURING THE INTEREST OF A COMMUNITY

This paper by Wm. E. Foster, Librarian of the Providence Library, appears in the double number of _The Library Journal_ for September-October, 1880. Written forty years ago it is more advanced from the standpoint of socialization, especially as regards group-action, than some pronouncements that one might hear to-day. A sketch of Mr. Foster appears in Vol. I. of this series.

This mainly resolves itself into a consideration of direct and indirect methods. The one attempts only to supply the public with what it wants; the other, striving after the truest improvement of the readers, in time secures, with the growth of intelligent appreciation, an interest even more active, and vastly more permanent, than the other. No library may safely disregard either class of methods, and their proper adjustment is a point which may very profitably engage much of the librarian's attention.

It is true that the first of these is not likely to escape his attention. "What the public wants" is a consideration which will meet him frequently, from one end of the year to the other. No one needs to be told, for instance, that the public wants to be amused. Doubtless the class of books described as "humorous" would constitute, to a large body of readers in any one of our cities, the true ideal of a collection of books. The taste for imaginative literature begins early and lasts long, with a large number of readers. "Something new" is a phrase whose attractiveness is not far from universal. Still further, if it is a question between a "true account," which deals with stirring adventures, and another "true account," whose pages are devoted to an impassive statement of scientific facts, there is not much question which will find the most readers among the general public. "What the public wants," then, as regards the choice of books, while it certainly does not indicate a high degree of enlightenment, has perhaps the merit of being true to nature.

There are certain points of administration, also, in which the interest of the public is concerned. It is in favor of having the library as near its place of residence as possible; and here, unfortunately, "the public" is a plural personage which cannot all be suited at once. It is in favor of that method of obtaining the privileges of the library which requires the least trouble and inconvenience on its part, and seldom sees the need of a careful verification of the applicant's identity. It is in favor of the fewest restrictions on access to the books, and on the time for keeping them. It is in favor, decidedly, of that "charging system" which will deliver the book soonest. It is in favor of finding the library open on all days and at all hours, sometimes even not regarding the specified hours announced as worthy of consideration. In short, while it is by no means difficult to persuade the public of the reasonableness of a particular restriction, yet its first thought is undeniably largely influenced by selfish considerations.

Nor is the larger part of the public any more fond of bestowing deep and painstaking thought upon the books which it reads, and of carrying the mind systematically through a complicated mental process. It is not improbable that some readers would be glad of some method of using books which should save them the trouble of any mental process. And, while these readers are so much averse to any troublesome efforts toward improvement on their own part, it would be scarcely reasonable to look for any very intelligent supervision by them of the reading of their children, or of the pupils in the schools. Here, again, what the public wants is "the royal road"--some "short and easy method."

That library, then, which would awaken and develop a lively interest among its readers in the miscellaneous public, cannot certainly complain of a lack of methods by which to secure such interest. It may include in its selection of books a suitable percentage of fiction, and humorous works. It may infuse "new blood" into the library by frequent and regular purchase of the latest publications. It may add largely to the department of voyages and travels, of books copiously illustrated,--of popular literature, in short. It may place its main building in the center of population, and establish branches for the accommodation of outlying localities. It may recognize the desirableness of "the least red tape" in registering readers, of open book-shelves, of expeditious serving of readers, and long periods of time for the use of the library and the retention of books. It may furnish its readers with explanations and directions for obtaining and using the books which shall require the least difficulty in understanding and applying them. It may, and it should, recognize the value of all these principles, and the library which fails to act on them does so at its peril. Yet these points do not comprise all that demand attention; and the effectiveness of even these is due to the limits which are set to them. A certain amount of fiction is well enough, but to enlarge this department at the expense of all others would clearly defeat the library's purpose. Diminution of restrictions in the use of books is certainly agreeable to the public, but the removal of all restrictions would result in such a loss of books as would soon work its own cure.

The question, "What does the public want?" is not the only, nor, in fact, the chief question to be borne in mind in the conduct of a library. One has only to keep his eyes open to see how suggestive as to methods is this other question: "Of what service may the library be?" And it is safe to say that one who has not given the subject attention will be surprised to find at how many points a collection of books, and the thought there contained, touch human life. Here is a machine-shop with its hundred or more workmen, many of whom are anxious to study some mechanical work. The library has such works, and is glad to supply them. Here again is a society of natural history, whose members are systematically studying some department of natural science. To them, also, the library willingly offers its resources in that department. With no less willingness it offers its cooperation to those who are following a course of public lectures on some topic of political science or of art, to a college class studying topically some epoch of history or period of literature; or to a public-school teacher, with a class in geography; or a parent desiring some suitable reading for a child. Or, with no specified class of persons in view, it seeks to make its collection generally available, by regular references to its resources on matters of current and universal interest.

Much more effective, however, than the best of such attempts at reaching classes of readers will be the aid rendered to individual readers. Not general and indefinite, but specific and direct assistance, is here given, and, although at first this kind of work might seem to be impracticable in a large library, yet one who tries it will be interested to see how far such individual methods may be introduced. The librarian almost mechanically learns "to pigeon-hole" in his mind the peculiar tastes and lines of reading of single readers, and, when the occasion presents itself, can bring to their notice books and articles which they are glad to obtain. More than one librarian makes it a regular practice, in adding new books to the library or in collecting material bearing upon some one topic, to drop a postal to this and that reader who, he knows, will be glad of just this information. The more the conducting of a library can be made an individual matter, bringing particular books to the notice of particular readers, the more effective it becomes.

It remains to consider what may be called the "general effect" of such individual efforts, continued from one year to another. They will certainly result in giving the public a large amount of assistance. Being exerted in connection with the whole community, they cannot fail to leave an influence, like the school, the church, or the newspaper,--an influence moreover, which, if wisely directed, and intelligently shaped, will make the public library idea appreciably felt in the civilization of the country.

Nor can it fail to have a reflex influence in securing the interest of the public. If methods of the former class were able, by their direct agency, to accomplish practical results, even more significant and more permanent are those reached indirectly by this method. No class of people will be so truly attached to the institution, by active interest, as those who feel that they have been personally aided and improved through its agency. The former methods are directly adapted to secure popularity, the latter to win gratitude; and if it should ever become necessary to choose one of these, at the expense of the other, there can be little room for hesitation. The growth of public sentiment in communities like Boston and Worcester, where public libraries have been administered on these principles, and with these ends in view, for a series of years, is very instructive. Public sentiment, like confidence, is "a plant of slow growth"; but experience shows that when the conviction has once thoroughly penetrated a community that an institution like this is sincerely aiming to serve the public, a hold on its sympathy and interest has been acquired not easily to be shaken. It should be the aim of each librarian to make the usefulness of his institution so manifest that the public will as soon think of dispensing with the post-office as with the library.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT

The justification for taxing the members of a community to support a Public Library, although rarely questioned to-day was argued with heat in former times. Earlier, there was the same difference of opinion with regard to the public schools. In order to obtain the argument in opposition, in its best form, we have had to draw from a British source, which we consider it proper to quote here because it elicited a reply from an American librarian which will immediately follow:

FREE LIBRARIES

(AN ARGUMENT AGAINST PUBLIC SUPPORT)

This paper, by M.D. O'Brien, forms