“Now I propose, as soon as practicable, to assist in putting into several thousand little communities in the West and South either a free reading-room or a free circulating library, or both, thinking that it will be the best possible use to which money can be put.
“Perhaps it may be wondered at that I do not spend these millions in the direction of Home Missionary work. I have several reasons for not doing so, although I am heartily in sympathy with it. Never was there nobler, more self-denying and more fruitful labor than that of the overworked men and women in the Home Missionary field. But, in the first place, there are one hundred needed where one can be found to go. The religious denomination in which I was reared graduates but about one hundred students from all its theological seminaries every year, scarcely enough, one would think, to supply the vacancies in the pulpits of the East, to say nothing of the West, and I presume the same is nearly true of other denominations which I should be quite as ready to help as my own.
“The library can never take the place of the church, but I am convinced that in many communities the provision of a comfortable, tastefully furnished room, filled with periodicals, giving to every one access to the best literary, political, scientific, and religious thought of our time, will do quite as much for the morals of a town as anything that could be devised.
“Unlike a church, it will be open every day in the week. It will be a counter attraction to the street and the saloon, and if there is a circulating library as well as a reading-room, it will serve to stimulate and open a larger life to every one who takes a book from it. The home missionary shall not be lacking, but she shall appear under the guise of a librarian instead of a preacher.
“In regions where there is a large proportion of foreigners, there shall be books and periodicals in their native tongues. Few who have not looked into the matter realize the terrible mental strain to the mind of the immigrant from the disruption of old associations and the necessity, in middle life, of adapting himself to utterly new conditions, in a land where his language is unspoken. Many succumb to this, and the statistics of the numbers of
OUR FOREIGN-BORN INSANE
are startling.
“The same is true of the insanity caused among herders’ and farmers’ wives by their dreary, isolated lives on the treeless plains. We commonly think of people living close to nature and absorbed in simple daily tasks as being exceptionally healthy and placid. But a visit to our hospitals for the insane will tell a different story. The lonely woman, with no outlook but the prairie’s level floor, to whom a new book, a new picture, a new idea never comes, is, as statistics show, as much in danger of losing her mind as the man on Wall Street whose life is a fever of excitement.
“Now, to these tired, lonely women, to the young girls who as soon as they are well into their teens begin to think of marrying and abandoning all study, to the young men so eager to make money that self-culture is counted an unnecessary luxury, to the boys who spend their evenings listening to the vulgar talk of the teamsters at the corner grocery, to the ministers and teachers who find that their scant salaries permit of none of the new books and papers which are essential to their mental life,—to all these people I should like to give the blessing of books.
“The offer of a ‘St. Nicholas’ or ‘Youth’s Companion,’ from a pleasant librarian, will be quite as effectual to keep a boy off the street of an evening as an invitation from a home missionary to go to a prayer-meeting. And to the man who may never enter the building, the sight, as he passes to his work every day, of a beautiful little temple devoted to the things of thought, will serve all unconsciously to make life seem a little cleaner and sweeter and more dignified than it would be without it.