But like Cassius, the truth is self-slain and dies among its friends. It still remains true that the newspaper is oftener challenged for telling what is unpleasant than for recording what is untrue, and the refined and cultured soul, which objects to the newspaper because it reeks with the ill news of society for whose ills no man can avoid his just share of responsibility, but imitate the Pharaoh, who slew the messengers of evil and sunk in wilful ignorance to an ignoble grave.
The nation which lives by the newspaper will lose touch with the past. The nation which lives in the library will want knowledge of the present. We know all too much as Americans of the peril of thinking by the newspapers. German thought has run in the seclusive channel of the academic library to the lack and loss of civic consciousness. Germany was the last of modern states to act as a people. We were the first, the balance and connection between the newspaper and the library, news and liberal letters, the reporter and the professor, cuts up by the roots the frequent conception of the library as a place occult, withheld, untrod; shut apart from practical ends, the grant of society to the scholar—useful to letters, useless to life. This “idol of the market-place” falls to pieces confronted by the facts of social structure. As well might the brain be held silent, the voice of memory dumb, the light of consciousness in darkness by the side of the brute mechanical forces of the body; silence, seclusion, separation from the active life of society, these may be for the exchange and the market-place, the railroad and the factory, vast, dumb mechanic processes which perish in producing, but not for the library—not here, not here. These walls ring with war. They sound with the conflicts of the race. Here, rather than in any arsenal is heard
—“the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own.”
Thus much for the library in organized society. Long since have we known of books as the counsellors and comforters of men. To us all they have been teachers, to each of us companions. That great majority, greater in wisdom no less than in number, in which by the iron decrees of fate so many are called and so few are chosen to lasting immortality, holds all of whom living the world was not worthy, but of whom dead it slowly seeks to be. Here and here alone in all shapes and forms, we build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers crucified and here doubtless our children will build the sepulchres of those who in our day are despised and afflicted of men for the truth's sake. In joy and in grief, in life and in death some book supports, sustains, and soothes each of us, and in this library the very light has been trained to teach us at every window and door that we might enter it to pass within the presence of the mighty dead, to enjoy the companionship of that great company no man can number of wise men made perfect by time.
But to the seeing eye and the hearing ear, awake and attentive to all that a library is, not for men but for man, not for individuals but for the race, a greater than Solomon is here, and a mightier shape fills these halls and looks down from these shelves than all the trooped and illustrious dead. These books, shelf on shelf, these volumes, which fit subject by subject into the storied arch of human knowledge, resting one side on metaphysics and the other on history, the science of mind and the science of man, seem existent human memory. The complete library would round and fill the record of the race. At best, we have but a beggarly fragment. If a single copy of each of the 13,000,000 volumes which dropped from the press in 450 years were by some glad miracle multiplying knowledge gathered in one place, human memory would be unbroken for this short span of its long stay on the globe. Of 13,000,000 but 1,000,000 rest in the largest library on earth in Bloomsbury Square, and not a half are gathered in all known libraries. But such as it is, large or small complete or incomplete, a great library to its capacity gives, as this has begun to do, the only measure we have of the recollection of the race. Here we stand face to face not with men or nations, race or people, but with man. Blindly our humanity still struggles to shape its thought, dumb, inarticulate, unconscious, travelling in darkness and laboring in pain, century by century, and generation by generation, in the slow pilgrimage toward the conscious and consecration before it. The thunder of its power who shall know? Who shall sound its depths or scale its heights? Who shall know it in all its compass and sound, measure the confines thereof or prophesy its far final coming? These are all hid in the inscrutable decrees of God from the sight of men, but here, here and in places like this there rises before us like an exhalation of the past in these volumes, in this library, the majestic and visible memory of man.
Rightly here, as in that larger treasure house in London, have we gathered museum and library under the same roof. These shapeless fragments worked by the early cunning of savage man, these inscribed marbles and sculptured slabs, these tablets and relics of another and a distant life, these all, each in its place, play their part in the recorded memory of the race. Out of every fragment from every book shines this Ancient of Days, who before Abraham was and after us shall be. Who and what are we, creatures of a day, toilers of an hour, to be measuring by our experience the metes and bounds in the manifestations of his mighty memory. Rather let our labor be given to render complete and to transmit unbroken our share in this great heritage by preserving the universal printed record of the life about us. The librarian falling far short of the honor and amplitude of his office, standing between the living past and the slowly dying life of the present, now and then apologizes for saving every empty volume, because none but prescient omniscience can tell which of 10,000 titles will be demanded by some solitary reader a century hence. How petty the plea, how narrow the argument, how infinitesimal the claims of this distant reader who after all may never appear! But how simple, how sufficient, how adequate becomes the reason for the preservation of every volume when we remember that it, too, is a part of this vast image of human memory seated by the slow river of time, more vocal than that of Memnon, older and younger, and with every fresh sunburst of genius breaking into fresh song!
In high reason has our own Historical Society gathered every volume which fell in this State and city from the press of the last century. Only thus can the span of human memory be set forth without a single forgetful flaw. If the like effort is made here to fill a like responsibility for the passing moment to the future, it is possible that the Historical Society of another century will not find it necessary to pay $700 for an almanac which might once have been had for a penny, and yet how grievous the gap in the continuous and social memory of this our city if the solitary copy left of Bradford's Almanac, the first product of our press, had not found a secure resting-place.
A great library, therefore, does not merely transmit the memory of the past; it is daily providing memory for the future, safe preserved “against the wreckful siege of battering days.” For the individual no worse hap can fall than loss of memory. All other powers may remain. This lost, all are worthless. Stripped of memory, the soul has no future and no past, naught save an infructuose now. Nor less, the race. The destruction of the Alexandrian Library, whether with Abulfaraj we attribute it to the intelligent Moslem, or with Gibbon to the ignorant monk, was not the loss of so many books and parchments. It was the paralysis of a great lobe of human memory, fatal lesion had fallen on the localized organ of recollection in the brain of humanity. If we had the 200 plays of Aeschylus, the 160 of Sophocles, the last books of Livy, the missing annals of Tacitus, which this library held, the stature of these writers would not be increased. Like the greater peaks of every chain they already rise as they recede. It is only the foot-hill that needs bulk. These, and lost books like them, would fill for us the full measures of classic memory. As library after library perished and book after book shared the fate of those fathered by Ptolemy, the wreck and loss of human memory went on. The ages that we call dark lacked not in men of action. Those ages of faith had their men of thought matching any before or after. They laid for us the foundations of a civil liberty more indestructible than that of Rome. The piers of that great arch of law along which our rights daily travel in safety were built by them. Their architecture and their sculpture equals any. Their knowledge of the earth, as a whole, was immeasureably in advance of classic conception. They furnished in Dante one of the two or three poets for all time, and in the Roman Church they gave the race a creation and conception of whose future it would be a rash man who ventured to say that it was destined to be less than its past, imperial as its history has been. These ages were dark, not from lack of light and of leading, but from lack of memory. The ages had lost touch of the elbow in their march through the dark defile of time. The Renaissance was less the revival of human knowledge than the recovery of human memory. Age was joined again to age in the unbroken sequence of continuous recollection, and Greece laid her hands to transmit an Apostolic succession of memory on the bowed and studious head of the modern world.
To play its part in transmitting and preserving human memory this library is tonight opened and dedicated. Our Library Committee, and you, sir, its head, who have shown us that whole libraries of comment may be condensed into a volume by your magic alembic, providing for criticism a new instrument of precision akin to the measurements and the analysis of the exact science—you, sir, in the loving care you have given this building, have not been providing a retreat for scholars; you have built and fashioned here another refuge and stronghold, fortified