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 surpass it as an agency in popular education. Schools, colleges, lectures, classes, 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 institutions 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 passive. 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.