The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, Æschylus, 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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ