That the majority of books withdrawn from public libraries are works of fiction cannot be denied. Many librarians are wont to deplore this fact, and most libraries endeavor in one way or another to decrease the percentage of fiction in their circulation.
The proportion of recreative reading in a public library is necessarily large. In like manner, the greater proportion of those who visit a zoological or botanical garden do so for amusement. Yet the information that they secure in so doing is none the less valuable and both are certainly educational institutions. So if in the public library a large number of its users get their history, their travel and their biography through the medium of recreative readings we should not complain. Were it otherwise these readers would probably lack altogether the information that they now certainly acquire.
Taking up the final count in the indictment, it is doubtless true that sentimental and emotional considerations have had much to do with library development. They have furnished the initial motive power, as they have for free schools, for the origin and progress of democratic government, and for most of the advances of civilization. They often precede deliberate, conscious reasoning and judgment, yet they are often themselves the result of an unconscious reasoning process producing action of the will in advance of deliberate judgment. Sometimes they are pure reflexes, like winking when the eye is threatened by a blow. The free public library can neither be established nor maintained usefully without their aid, but their methods—or want of method—must be carefully guided to produce good results.
The sentiment that we ought to establish institutions for the diffusion of knowledge is the expression of a real economic need and should be directed and encouraged and not suppressed. Logic is a useful steering apparatus, but a very poor motive power.
THE LIBRARY: A PLEA FOR ITS RECOGNITION
Delivered by Frederick M. Crunden before the Library Section of the International Congress of Arts and Science, held in connection with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis in 1904, closes with a summary of the public library's functions that remains measurably true to-day, although, of course, it could now be somewhat expanded.
A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in Vol. I.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition is an epitome of the life and activity of the world—from the naked Negrito to the grande dame with her elaborate Paris costume, from the rude wigwam of the red Indian to the World's Fair palace filled with the finest furniture, rugs and tapestries, sculpture and painting, and decorations that the highest taste and finest technique can produce—from the monotonous din of the savage tom-tom to the uplifting and enthralling strains of a great symphony orchestra—from fire by friction, the first step of man beyond the beast, to the grand electric illumination that makes of these grounds and buildings the most beautiful art-created spectacle that ever met the human eye. And to all this magnificent appeal to the senses are superadded the marvels of modern science and its applications—the wonders of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope, the telegraph, in its latest wireless extension, the electric motor and electric light, the telephone and the phonograph, the Roentgen ray and the new-found radium.
And now after this vision of wondrous beauty, this triumph of the grand arts of architecture and sculpture and landscape—of all the arts, fine and useful—has for six months enraptured the senses of people from all quarters of the globe, the learned men of the world have gathered here to set forth and discuss the fundamental principals that underlie the sciences, their correlations and the methods of their application to the arts of life—to summarize the progress of the past, to discuss the condition of the present and attempt, perhaps, a forecast of the future.