Why do we need a public library? Part 2

OREGON LIBRARY COMMISSION.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

We all believe in public libraries. We frequently discuss the library we are to get "bye and bye." We do not find that it is helping the boys and girls who are growing up in our town now. Will the next generation need it more than this? Will the children of the next generation be dearer to us than the boys and girls that now cheer our firesides? Will they use a library better because their parents have not had such privileges?

We all want a library, for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the good name of our village. Why not get it now and be getting the good out of it?

It is only a question of method.

The library when built should benefit all the people, and therefore it should be built by all the people. Give us all a chance to help, and then the library will belong to all of us.

WISCONSIN FREE LIBRARY COMMISSION.

LIBRARIES AND HAPPINESS

The great purpose of a public library is to promote and unite intelligence. It brings together the products of the wise minds of the world. It holds within its walls a collection of all the wise and witty things ever said: these it marks and indexes and offers to its friends.

It is in its community a sort of intellectual minuteman, always ready to supply to every comer something of interest and pleasure. It puts good books, and no others, into the hands of children. It tells about Cinderella and informs you on riots in Moscow. It offers you a novel of modern j.a.pan and a history of Venice of the past. It knows about the milk in the cocoanut, the floods of the river Nile, the advantages of education, the evils of legislation, how to plan a home, why bread won't rise, and can tell more about the mental failings that give Jamaica and Venezuela trouble than most of our congressmen ever dreamed of.

Reading is the short cut into the heart of life. If you are talking with a group of friends about, for example, different parts of the United States, and some one happens to mention a city or town in which you have lived, note how your interest quickens, and how eager you are to hear news of the place or to tell of your experience in it. This is a simple every-day fact. The same thing you have observed a thousand times about any subject or talk with which you may be familiar. We learn about many things just by keeping alive and moving round! Those things we have learned about we can't help being interested in. That is the way we are made. If we knew about more things our interests would be greater in number, keener, more satisfying; we would talk more, ask more questions, be more alert, get more pleasure.

The lesson from this is plain enough: if you wish to have a good time, learn something. You like to meet old friends. Your brain, also, likes to come across things it knows already, to renew acquaintance with the knowledge it has stored away and half forgotten. The pleasures of recognition and a.s.sociation; the delights of renewing your friendships with your own ideas are many, easy to get, never failing. But if you wish to have interests and delights in good plenty you must know of many things. If you wish to be happy, learn something.

This sounds like advice to a student. It is not, it is a suggestion to the wayfarer. For this learning process may be as delightful as it is to gather flowers by the roadside in a summer walk.

J. C. DANA.

LIBRARY WORTH SELF-DENIAL

An inexhaustible mine of pleasure is open for the boy or girl who loves good books and has access to them. Without effort on the part of the parent they are kept off the street and from the company of the idle and vicious and are storing their minds with useful knowledge, or are being taught high ideals and n.o.ble purposes. Thus they develop into men and women who are an honor to their parents and worthy citizens of our great republic.

Such is the product of a Free Public Library. Is it not worth the small pittance it will cost? Many a laboring man spends more money in a week for tobacco than the maintenance of a library would cost him in a year.

Is not the education and the development of our bright boys and girls worth a little self-denial?

We all desire that our children shall have better opportunities than we have had, and not have to work as we have worked. Here is an opportunity to help them help themselves, which is the very best help that can be given any one. Let's be "boosters" and help ourselves, help our town, and help our boys and girls by unitedly supporting the library proposition.

IOWA LIBRARY COMMISSION.

REASONS FOR HAVING A FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

Public libraries have without delay become an essential part of a public education system and are as clearly useful as the public schools. They are not only cla.s.sed with schools, but have generally become influential adjuncts of the public schools. The number of readers is rapidly increasing and the character of the books is constantly improving.

Not infrequently the objection is heard that the public libraries are opening the doors to light and useless books; that reading can be, and often is, carried to a vicious and enervating excess, and therefore that the libraries' influence is doubtful and on the whole not good. This argument does not need elaborate exposure.

The main purpose of the library is to counteract and check the circulation and influence of the empty and not infrequently vicious books that are so rife. A visit to any news-stand will disclose a world of low and demoralizing "penny dreadfuls" and other trash. These are bought by boys and girls because they want to read and can nowhere else obtain reading material. This deluge of worthless periodicals and books can be counteracted only by gratuitous supplies from the public library.

Whether these counteracting books be fiction or not, they may be pure and harmless, and often of intellectual merit and moral excellence. The question is not whether people shall read fiction--for read it they will--but whether they are to have good fiction instead of worthless and harmful trash.

The tendency to read inferior books can soon be checked by a good library. If the attention of the children in school is directed to good books, and the free library contains such books, there will be no thought of the news-stand as the place for finding reading matter.

The economical reason for establishing free public libraries is the fact that public officers and public taxation manage and support them efficiently and make them available to the largest number of readers. By means of a free library there is the best utilization of effort and of resources at a small cost to individuals.

While a private library may greatly delight and improve the owner and his immediate circle of friends, it is a luxury to which he and they only can resort.

A library charging a fee may bring comfort to a respectable board of directors by ministering to a small and financially independent circle of book-takers, by its freedom from the rush of numerous and eager readers, and by strict conformity to the notions and vagaries of the managers. But such a library never realizes the highest utility. The greater part of the books lie untouched upon the shelves, and compared with the free library it is a lame and impotent affair.

The books of a public library actively pervade the community; they reach and are influential with very large numbers and the utility of the common possession--books--is multiplied without limit. Before several of our towns lies the question of opening to all what is now limited to those who pay a fee. This is not merely a limitation--it is practically a prohibition.

Whether right or wrong, human beings as at present const.i.tuted will not frequent in large numbers libraries that charge a fee. The spirit of the age and the tendency of liberal communities are entirely in favor of furnishing this means of education and amus.e.m.e.nt without charge.

Certainly towns which can maintain by taxation, paupers, parks, highways and schools have no reasonable ground for denying free reading to their inhabitants.

These towns spend vast sums of money in providing education, and yet omit the small extra expenditure which would enable young men and women to continue their education.

The experience of Library Commissions of various states has amply demonstrated that libraries and literature are sought for and appreciated quite as much by rural communities as by the larger towns, and not infrequently the appreciation is apparently keener, because of the absence of interests and amus.e.m.e.nts other than those provided by the library. There is now no real reason why every part of this state may not enjoy the advantages and pleasures of book distribution, for concentration of effort in the small towns elsewhere has provided efficient, attractive and economical libraries, and could as well do so here.

F. A. HUTCHINS.

MISSION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

It is our business in this country to get at the best methods to govern ourselves. How many of our best people have paused to reflect on what that means, and on all it means? It means that now we have about 80,000,000 of sovereigns. It was all very well when we were a little confederation of h.o.m.ogeneous stock stretching along the Atlantic sea-board. We had our dissensions then, but our population was permeated with the principles of our government. In one hundred years we have swelled from a handful to 80,000,000, and a large part of them made up of additions from the nations of the earth, and not the self-governing nations. And the problem is to educate the children of these, as well as our own children, in the principles of that government of which they are an essential and vital part.

This is the first problem, and if it is not attended to, our government will crumble away and decay from neglect. We do not want denizens in this state and this nation, we want citizens. We do not want ward politics, but we do want government as our forefathers understood it.

And it is the duty of every right-minded citizen to work unfalteringly for this end. The question is one of expediency.

We want citizens. And the public school and the public library are the places where citizens are made. Therefore we must labor for and support these inst.i.tutions first and foremost. To a very great extent, the librarian is the custodian of public morals and the moulder of public men.

The librarian must, and he usually does, feel his responsibility. The word "responsibility" should be given equal weight with the word "liberty" and emblazoned beside it, and it is these two things that the public librarian through his knowledge of good literature must impress upon our coming generations--"liberty and responsibility."

WINSTON CHURCHILL.

LIBRARY EXTENSION

Our public schools are doing a great work, but, after all, "the older generation remains untouched, and the a.s.similation of the younger can hardly be complete or certain as long as the homes of the parents remain comparatively unaffected." For those whose early education has been neglected either by reason of family circ.u.mstances or because of wayward disposition, and who realize their need before it is too late, there are night schools, business courses and correspondence school courses, with the minor advantages and stimulus offered by public lecture courses.

Volunteer study clubs and societies for research are being organized in great numbers. And, more potent and more forceful, more universal in its application than all these because better organized, better equipped and readier to avail itself of all existing affiliating agencies, is that national movement which has become known for want of a better term as library extension.

Library extension aims to supply to every man, woman and child, either through its own resources or by co-operation with other affiliated agencies, what each community, or any group in any community, or any individual in the community may require for mental stimulus, intellectual recreation or practical knowledge and information useful in one's daily occupation.

HENRY E. LEGLER.

The opening of a free public library 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. All that is primarily needful in order to use a library is the ability to read; primarily, for there must also be the inclination, and after that, some guidance in reading well.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.