What are the facts? There has just been a great Librarians' Convention assembled from all parts of the country, and keeping together for many days. Did a single speaker at that Convention take the ground that “oftener than otherwise” the benefactors of public libraries were chilled and discouraged? On the contrary, it was reported that such benefactors were never so active, and their benefactions were never so large. The tone was not one of discouragement, but of buoyancy and hope. Every one admitted the vastness of the educational engine created by the free library system; every one had his own suggestion by way of improvement or development, but every one expressed a cordial faith in the community, and reported encouragement in all work well done. The simple truth is that the creation of a system of such libraries is like the creation of a great railway system; it must be an evolution, not a creation outright. The wisest librarian in America fifty years ago had no more conception of the free library system of to-day than had Benjamin Franklin of our postal methods; nor can any one now foresee what fifty years of development will do for either.
The truth is that every step in any great organization brings out new possibilities, new dangers, and new resources. Side by side with the perils of free libraries—as of too much light reading, and the absence of proper appreciation of the best things—there are evoked resources to meet these dangers.
Outside the library there come up the “association to promote study at home,” and the vast Chautauqua “reading circles”—all these being essentially based on the free library system, and implying it for their full development. Inside the library there grow up such methods as those of Mr. S.S. Green, City Librarian of Worcester, Massachusetts, whose ways of making such an institution useful to all sorts and conditions of the people may take rank with Rowland Hill's improvements in postal service, as to their results on democratic civilization. He has succeeded in linking the library and the public schools so closely that he and the teachers acting in concurrence, indirectly control the reading of the whole generation that is growing up in that city. The details must be sought in his reports—as, for instance, one from the Library Journal of March, 1887, which is printed as a leaflet; but the essential thing in managing libraries, as in managing schools, is to have faith in the community in which one lives, and to believe that people do, as the Scripture has it, “covet earnestly the best gifts,” if you will only show them how those best gifts are to be obtained. Put into school and library methods one-half the organizing ability brought to bear on railways and telegraphs, and we shall stand astonished at the results within our reach. Those already attained, if fairly looked at, are sufficient to encourage any one. The writer has at two different times and in two different States been a director in these institutions. Whenever he needed a little stimulus toward doing his duty it was his custom to go and look over the rack containing the books lately brought back by readers. With all necessary deduction for the love of fiction—a love shared in these days by the wisest and best—the proportion of sensible and useful reading was always such as to vindicate the immense value of the free public libraries.
TWO FUNDAMENTALS
Mary Salome Cutler, now Mrs. Milton Fairchild, is the first librarian to be quoted in this symposium. A sketch of her appears in Vol. II. of this series. In the paragraphs quoted below which form part of a paper read by Miss Cutler, then vice-director of the New York State Library School, before the Pennsylvania Library Club and printed in The Library Journal (October, 1896), appears a definite recognition of the social character of the library's task. Her two fundamentals—organization and human feelings—are both decided elements in its socialization.
In considering library interests we do well, I think, not to confine ourselves to the limited range of library subjects.
That mysterious thing which we call society is growing more complex, every part more curiously intertwined with every other part, each human life bearing some relation to every other human life. Whether he will or no, it is literally true that “no man liveth to himself alone.” If it were possible, then, as a part of this organism to discover some of the laws which govern the whole, we might come back to our special domain with an application of the laws which would have the force of freshness. I believe that we gain an insight into these controlling principles only by yielding to the tendency of solidarity, by opening ourselves to surrounding influences, by living the fullest life of which we are capable. I think I have seen the workings of two of these laws which have a close relation to each other. If I am right your experience will confirm mine, and we can together make the application to what concerns us most—the library interests of to-day.