Chapter VII: Part 7

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.