In the scheme of classification, our subject appears in the last department that concerns itself with man's purely mundane affairs, and is the last section in that department. It thus appears properly as a climax and summary of the arts and sciences intelligible to man in his present stage of existence; and if the problem of the future life is ever solved this side of the grave, the knowledge conserved and disseminated by the library will be the starting-point and the inspiration of the advance, as it has been of all progress since the art of written speech was invented. “The library is the reservoir of the common social life of the race. It is at once the accumulator and the transmitter of social energy.” Without the library the highest social culture is impossible; and a most moderate degree could be achieved by very few.
Under the main division, “Social Culture,” the library is one of the five sections in the Department of Education. In education are summed up all the achievements of the past and the possibilities of the future. In the words of Wendell Phillips, “Education is the one thing worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.” “Education,” exclaims Mazzini, “and my whole doctrine is included and summed up in this grand word.” It is practically a truism that Jules Simon utters when he says “Le peuple qui a les meilleures écoles est le premier peuple; s'il ne l'est pas aujourd'hui il le sera demain.”
Under this Department of Education, with its grades, the School, the College and the University, the Library is assigned the last section. It belongs there in chronological order of development as an active factor in popular instruction and enlightenment; and, furthermore, the presentation of its claims and functions comes naturally after those of the other factors in education, because it is an essential coadjutor and supplement to each and all. It is a summary and a climax. There have always been libraries, and they have always been a factor in education; but the public, free, tax-supported library is but just half a century old, and could hardly be considered out of the long clothes of infancy till the year 1876; while its general acceptance as an essential supplement to the public school and a co-ordinate factor with the college and university may be considered the accomplishment of the last decade. There are still teachers who look on general reading as an interference with school work and an extra burden on their shoulders.
We start, then, with the axiomatic proposition that all human progress depends on education; and no elaborate demonstration is necessary to show that the library is an essential factor in every grade of education.
Higher education, certainly, cannot dispense with the library. The well-known dictum of Carlyle, “The true university of modern times is a collection of books,” was accepted as a striking statement of a man with rhetorical habit, without, perhaps, a realization of its full significance. It has been recently expanded into a more express and specific tribute to the importance of the library in university education. In an address delivered in St. Louis and afterwards published in the North American Review, President Harper said:
“The place occupied by libraries and laboratories in the educational work of to-day, as compared with that of the past, is one of commanding importance. Indeed, the library and the laboratory have already practically revolutionized the methods of higher education. In the really modern institution, the chief building is the library. It is the center of institutional activity.... That factor of college work, the library, fifty years ago almost unknown, to-day already the center of the institution's intellectual activity, half a century hence, with its sister, the laboratory, almost equally unknown fifty years ago, will have absorbed all else and will have become the institution itself.”
As to the value of the library in elementary education Doctor Harris says:
“What there is good in our American system points towards the preparation of the pupil for the independent study of the book by himself. It points towards acquiring the ability of self-education by means of the library.”
I might quote similar utterances from many other eminent educators as to the value—the necessity—of the library in early education; but I can think of no stronger summing-up of the subject, nor from higher authority, than this statement from President Eliot: