Why do we need a public library? Part 3

THE LIBRARY--PLEASURE AND PROFIT

We cannot remind ourselves too frequently that a fundamental purpose of good books, and so of the library which possesses them, is to give pleasure, and that the library ought to be more closely and peculiarly a.s.sociated with pleasure than any other inst.i.tution supported by the public.

Life for most of us is sufficiently dull and colorless. The workday aspect of the world is always with us and oppresses us. For the average man and woman, whose education has been limited, whose imagination has lacked all wider opportunity for cultivation, the easiest escape from the cares of daily life, from the depressing monotony of daily routine, will be through the avenue opened by the story, the people's road out of a care-filled life, ever since the days of "Arabian Nights." Such readers as these desire fiction and ought to have it. If their imagination can be cultivated to the point of reaching similar freedom from care through poetry, through the drama, or through any of the higher forms of literature, so much the better. The library's message is to men and women cramped by toil and narrowed by routine, ever seeking some way out of this troublesome world into that larger realm which is more truly ours because it is our creation and that of our fellows. This wider world, in its friendliness and homelikeness, the library must represent.

The library is where the readers are introduced to the friendship of authors and their books. There they are at home and there we too may be at home. Old and young, rich and poor, wise and simple, men and women and children, there we may meet new friends on kindly and familiar terms and widen our thoughts as we learn of their wisdom and their wit. Still better, there we may renew our acquaintance with old friends and feel the contracted horizon of our lives again enlarge as we meet them once more. New friends and old, they all greet us with an a.s.sured welcome and yield to us the best which they can give, or we receive. We come to them not to learn lessons but to be with them for a little while and to live with them that larger and truer life which their presence creates for us.

Thus the library performs its high and n.o.ble duty of helping men to live, "not by bread alone, but by every word of G.o.d," who, through good books, has been speaking to the generations of men not only for their instruction but even more for their delight.

E. A. BIRGE.

VALUE OF FREE LIBRARIES

The best proof of the value of public libraries lies in the cordial support given them by all the people, when they are managed on broad, sensible lines. Such inst.i.tutions contribute to the fund of wholesome recreation that sweetens life and to the wider knowledge that broadens it. They give ambition, knowledge and inspiration to boys and girls from sordid homes, and win them from various forms of dissipation. They form a central home where citizens of all creeds and conditions find a common ground of useful endeavor.

Libraries are needed to furnish the pupils of our schools the incentive and the opportunity for wider study; to teach them "the art and science of reading for a purpose," to give to boys and girls with a hidden talent the chance to discover and develop it; to give to mechanics and artisans a chance to know what their ambitious fellows are doing; to give men and women, weary and worn from treading a narrow round, excursions in fresh and delightful fields; to give to clubs for study and recreation, material for better work, and, last but not least, to give wholesome employment to all cla.s.ses for those idle hours that wreck more lives than any other cause.

F. A. HUTCHINS.

"Even now many wise men are agreed that the love of books, as mere things of sentiment, and the reading of good books, as mere habit, are incomparably better results of schooling than any of the definite knowledge which the best of teachers can store into pupils' minds.

Teaching how to read is of less importance in the intelligence of a generation than the teaching what to read."

THE BOOKLESS MAN

The bookless man does not understand his own loss. He does not know the leanness in which his mind is kept by want of the food which he rejects.

He does not know what starving of imagination and of thought he has inflicted upon himself. He has suffered his interest in the things which make up G.o.d's knowable universe to shrink until it reaches no farther than his eyes can see and his ears can hear. The books which he scorns are the telescopes and reflectors and reverberators of our intellectual life, holding in themselves a hundred magical powers for the overcoming of s.p.a.ce and time, and for giving the range of knowledge which belongs to a really cultivated mind. There is no equal subst.i.tute for them.

There is nothing else which will so break for us the poor hobble of everyday sights and sounds and habits and tasks, by which our thinking and feeling are naturally tethered to a little worn round.

J. N. LARNED.

THE LIBRARY'S EDUCATIONAL MISSION

To the great ma.s.s of boys and girls the school can barely give the tools with which to get an education before they are forced to begin their life work as breadwinners. Few are optimistic enough to hope that we can change this condition very rapidly. The great problem of the day is, therefore, to carry on the education after the elementary steps have been taken in the free public schools. There are numerous agencies at work in this direction--reading rooms, reference and lending libraries, museums, summer, vacation and night schools, correspondence and other forms of extension teaching; but by far the greatest agent is good reading. An educational system which contents itself with teaching to read and then fails to see that the best reading is provided, when undesirable reading is so cheap and plentiful as to be a constant menace to the public good, is as inconsistent and absurd as to teach our children the expert use of the knife, fork and spoon, and then provide them with no food. The most important movement before the professional educators to-day, is the broadening going on so rapidly in their duties to their profession and to the public. Too many have thought of their work as limited to schools for the young during a short period of tuition. The true conception is that we should be responsible for higher as well as elementary education, for adults as well as for children, for educational work in the homes as well as in the schoolhouses, and during life as well as for a limited course. In a nutsh.e.l.l, the motto of the extended work should be "higher education for adults, at home, during life."

MELVIL DEWEY.

THE FREEDOM OF BOOKS

The free town library is wholly a product of the last half century. It is the crowning creature of democracy for its own higher culture. There is nothing conceivable to surpa.s.s it as an agency in popular education.

Schools, colleges, lectures, cla.s.ses, clubs and societies, scientific and literary, are tributaries to it--primaries, feeders. It takes up the work of all of them to utilize it, to carry it on, and make more of it.

Future time will perfect it, and will perfect the inst.i.tutions out of which and over which it has grown; but it is not possible for the future to bring any new gift of enlightenment to men that will be greater, in kind, than the free diffusion of thought and knowledge as stored in the better literature of the world.

The true literature that we garner in our libraries is the deathless thought, the immortal truth, the imperishable quickenings and revelations which genius--the rare gift to now and then one of the human race--has been frugally, steadily planting in the fertile soil of written speech, from the generations of the hymn writers of the Euphrates and the Indus to the generations now alive. There is nothing save the air we breathe that we have common rights in so sacred and so clear, and there is no other public treasure which so reasonably demands to be kept and cared for and distributed for common enjoyment at common cost.

Free corn in old Rome bribed a mob and kept it pa.s.sive. By free books and what goes with them in modern America we mean to erase the mob from existence. There lies the cardinal difference between a civilization which perished and a civilization that will endure.

J. N. LARNED.

GOOD BOOKS

The library offers the advantages of good society to many who could not otherwise enjoy them. This is one of the most important influences that tells on individual character. A man is not only known by the company he keeps, but to a great extent he is made or unmade by his a.s.sociates.

A great part of what we learn and much of what we are is absorbed unconsciously from our environment.

Now books are written--at least the good books--by men and women of the better sort. They are people of marked intelligence and refinement. They have just views of truth and duty and are able to reveal to us many secrets respecting the life that is being lived around us. They are interpreters and guides in all lines of human activity and service. To be intimate with them is good society. If then we can bring all these choice spirits by their books into our village and introduce them to our children and our neighbors, even to the poorest, and let them talk to all who will listen, we have done something, we have done much to raise the tone of general intelligence and refinement.

Here is the great opportunity to reach the homes of the poor and the careless and even of the baser sort with new light. The books will interest and meet the craving for knowledge which everybody has, and then will come into confidential relations with many a reader, starting new trains of thought, suggesting new ideas, offering sympathy and kindling faith. The friendless will gain friends and these friends will do them good.

In such ways, this inst.i.tution, the public library, is calculated to enlarge and enrich the community's life.

WILLIAM R. EASTMAN.

PLACE AND PURPOSE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The place now a.s.signed the public library, by very general consent, is that of an integral part of our system of public and free education. On no other theory has it sure and lasting foundation; on no other theory may it be supported by general taxation; on no other theory can it be wisely and consistently administered. A public tax can be levied for the maintenance of a public library only upon the principle which underlies all righteous public taxation, not that the taxpayer wants something and will receive it in proportion to the amount of his contribution, but that the public wants something of such general interest and value that all property-owners may be asked and required to contribute towards its cost.

The demand for intelligent and effective citizenship is increasing daily, for two reasons: First--The problems of public life and of public service, of communal existence, are daily becoming more complex, more difficult of satisfactory solution. Second--We are recognizing more clearly than ever before that our present success and prestige are due to the fact that more than any other people in the world's history have we succeeded in securing that active partic.i.p.ation and practical co-operation of the whole people in all public affairs. In the whole people are we finding and are we to find wholesomeness and strength.

But coincident with this discovery, this keen realization of the place and value of all in advancing the common interests of all, has come the feeling: First--That the common public schools must be made good enough for all; and, Second--That even at their best they are insufficient. The five school years (average) of the American child const.i.tute a very narrow portal through which to enter upon the privileges and duties of life, as we desire life to be to every child born under the flag. There is need of far more information, instruction, inspiration and uplift than can possibly be secured in that limited time.

Casting about for a satisfactory supplement and complement for the public schools, we find the public library ready to render exactly this service; to make it possible for the adult to continue through life the growth begun in childhood in the public school. Only in this way and by this means can we hope to continue the common American people as the most uncommon people which the world has yet known.

Henceforth, then, these two must go hand in hand, neither trenching upon the field of the other, neither burdening or hampering the other, each helping the other. The public school must take the initiative, determining lines of thought and work, developing in each child the power to act and the tendency to act, making full use of the public library as an effective ally in all its current work, and making such use of it as to create in each pupil the library habit, to last through life. The public library must respond by every possible supplementary effort, by most intelligent co-operation, by most sympathetic and effective a.s.sistance, and by giving pupils a welcome which they will feel holds good till waning physical powers make further use of the library impossible.

NATIONAL EDUCATION a.s.s'N REPORT, 1906.

The most imperative duty of the state is the universal education of the ma.s.ses. No money which can be usefully spent for this indispensable end should be denied. Public sentiment should, on the contrary, approve the doctrine that the more that can be judiciously spent, the better for the country. There is no insurance of nations so cheap as the enlightenment of the people.

ANDREW CARNEGIE.

PUBLIC LIBRARY IS PUBLIC CO-OPERATION

A public library is the flower of the modern forms of co-operation, which secures for the individual, luxuries which he could not afford otherwise.

Instead of buying so many books and magazines which wear out on the shelves after one reading, let us "pool our issues" and put the mult.i.tude of small sums in one fund, buy the best at the lowest prices, and then use the volumes so bought for the good of all. We need spend no more money each year for literature, but we need to save the wastage due to unused books, foolish purchases, book agents, commissions, and needless profits--and we can have a public library without other cost.

A good public library in this town may help our neighboring farmers as well as our townspeople. They cannot support public libraries in their small communities. Their small school libraries give the children a taste for reading, but give them nothing to gratify that taste when they leave school. Let us join our forces for mutual advantage and get a better library and a wider community of interests.

WISCONSIN FREE LIBRARY COMMISSION.