The managers of our smaller libraries are apt to be picked men, who give unrequited labor and intelligence to their trust. But they are chosen at town meetings,—and to a certain extent must carry out the wishes of their electors. Upon this matter, as upon most others, it is the duty of the thoughtful men and women to create a wholesome public opinion. They must recognize the fact that the change from a few good books to an unlimited supply of all sorts of books is by no means an unmixed advantage to a community. While the results of town libraries, taken in the aggregate, are undoubtedly good, it is our duty to consider whether they ought not to be better.
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THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
The public library had now passed the period of the merely academic advocacy exemplified in the Ticknor letter of 1851. It was an actual, functioning institution, and as such was called upon to answer criticism and to justify its existence. The atmosphere of apologetics begins to appear in what its friends have to say about it. This is evident in the extract from Col. Higginson's “Men and Women” (New York, 1888) which immediately follows. The author's comparison of the evolution of a library with that of a great railroad system is perhaps the first hint of a comprehensive vision of the library as something bigger than any individual town or city institution and beyond it.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born in Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 1823, and graduated at Harvard in 1841. He entered the ministry in 1847 but retired in 1858 and served in the Civil War. From that time until his death, May 9, 1911, he devoted himself to literature, publishing a large number of books.
Just as there is a good deal of anxiety wasted in regard to our free public schools, especially on the part of those who have never entered them, so there is some misplaced solicitude in regard to our libraries. The free town or city library is one of the few things in our democratic society that would have pleased the splenetic Carlyle, who mourned in one of his early letters that every village in England had its jail, but none its open library. It is a pity, therefore, when a man of high standing and great influence writes of these institutions thus hastily (I take the passage from a well-known literary journal): “Among the forms of beneficence for which our own generation has been conspicuous is the Free Library.... But it is, I apprehend, no exaggeration to say that such well-meant generosity has oftener than otherwise (the italics are my own) been chilled and discouraged by its results. Appreciative readers are few, the best books are largely let alone, and the cost of the ‘plant‘and the taste which are put into it are often in most painful contrast to the appreciation which they have received.” Now, while every count of this last sentence may be true indictment, it is easy to show how little it sustains the verdict. “Appreciative readers” are few in the most cultivated circles, if their appreciation must be tested by “the best books” only. It is not easy even to know what the best books are, if we may judge by the tiresome failures in making out the list of them; and suppose that they were known, do we find many clergymen or bishops who habitually read Plato, Æschylus, and Dante, rather than “Ben-Hur” or “The lady or the tiger”? It does not therefore follow that people are unworthy of public libraries because “the best books are largely let alone”; the question is whether even the second best may not be good reading. We have the medical authority of Hippocrates for saying that the second best medicine may be better than the best, if the patient likes it best. So in regard to the fine buildings, the success of republican government happily does not depend on how far our citizens appreciate the architecture of the Capitol at Washington and the State House at Albany; and it is surely the same with libraries. Grant a few over-fine library buildings, built to please some private benefactor; grant a few mismanaged public libraries—though where these buildings or these libraries are I do not myself know—does the kindly writer of these lines mean to be understood as saying that “oftener than otherwise” our free public libraries are failures?
If he does, it can only be said that this remark adds another to the innumerable illustrations of that invaluable remark of Coleridge that we must take every man's testimony to the value of that which he does not know. All experience shows how easy it is to construct an institution out of one's own consciousness and then condemn it; we see this daily in what is written of our public school system. In General Butler's brief career as Governor of Massachusetts he made a severe attack upon the Normal Art School in Boston, and cited a pathetic instance of a fallen girl who undoubtedly (as he urged) received her first demoralization from the study of the nude in that school. It turned out on investigation that he himself had never entered the school, and that the young girl herself made no such charges; that there never had been any studying from nude models in the school; that she had attended it but a month or two, and this in its early days, when it did not possess so much as a plaster cast of a human foot or hand. No matter; the charge was reiterated up to the very end of His Excellency's career in office, and is believed by many worthy people of this day. It is equally easy to bring general charges against public libraries, and equally hard to remove their impression, however unjust and even cruel they may be.