The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

This section, devoted to the general relations of the library and society, which opened with a historical account by Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, may appropriately close with another of similar tenor, contributed eleven years later to The American Magazine of Civics (New York, May, 1895) by Prof. Henry H. Barber. It covers some of the same ground but gives results to a later date, while it is still only introductory to the social development of more recent years.

Henry Hervey Barber was born in Warwick, Mass., Dec. 30, 1835, graduated at Meadville Theological Seminary in 1861 and after holding several Unitarian pastorates was professor of philosophy and theology there from 1884 to 1904. He was also editor of the Unitarian Review from 1875 to 1884. He died about 1915.

No public institution has made greater progress during the last few years or grown more rapidly in public interest and favor than the free public library. The building of a magnificent structure in Chicago, together with the excellent Newberry free reference library, and in cooperation with the fast growing library of the Chicago University, will make perhaps the most superb public provision for free literary culture ever furnished by any municipality. Boston has lately transferred its more than half a million volumes to the new and noble public library building on the Back Bay. The newspapers of this last week tell us that in New York Mr. Tilden is after all not to be finally counted out; but that the two millions rescued from his estate by the high sense of honor of one of his heirs is to be joined with the invaluable Astor Library, and the choice Lennox Reference Library, and all made free and available to the public—a property valued in the aggregate at eight million dollars. These events, together with the recent founding of the Carnegie free libraries in Pittsburg and Allegheny, the not very remote establishment of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and the addition by Mr. Henry C. Lea to the splendid Ridgway foundation in Philadelphia, constitute a series of brilliant triumphs for the free public library, unparalleled in the history of educational institutions, and seldom equalled, I must think, in the intellectual progress of civilization.

Nor do these metropolitan successes indicate, after all, the most essential advance. The frequency with which private beneficence is coming to the aid of public enterprise in smaller cities and country towns, for the establishment and increase of these libraries; the recent notable instances of stimulative auxiliary legislation; and the growth of intelligent interest in new and widely scattered sections of the civilized world, are equally significant, and perhaps even more widely beneficent. It is the era of the free public library; and it is of special interest to us to see that our community and our commonwealth are moving in accord with this tide of new feeling and enterprise concerning it.

Of special interest, I say, to us as Pennsylvanians; for we are glad to remember that it is here that the first impulse was given to the foundation of the system of circulating libraries, the development of which is the free public library in England and America. Benjamin Franklin, after considerable effort, founded in 1732 the Philadelphia Library Company, the “mother,” as he himself calls it, “of all the subscription libraries in North America.”

This library which Franklin started for the advantage of himself and his fifty young business associates, in the early time, when, as he says, “there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston,” and when most of the books had to be imported from England, was followed soon by the establishment of more ambitious similar libraries in Newport (1747) and Hartford (1774); and later in many other places in England and this country. These were called public libraries, though books could only be taken out by subscribers. Probably, however, as in Philadelphia, the librarian could “permit any civil gentlemen to peruse the books of the library in the library room.”

But it was in the formation of many so-called “Social Libraries” in the smaller cities and country towns of New England and the Middle States, early in the present century, that the foundations of the free municipal library were laid. These subscription libraries, in their growth and in their decay, no less than in the appetite for books they developed, created a demand and at length a necessity for public provision for what had come to be one of the prime intellectual needs of many communities.

Meantime in Scotland, in 1816, Samuel Brown of Haddington, following in part the methods of London booksellers, established a system of free itinerating libraries, loaning without cost selections of fifty books in each package to villages and neighborhoods that would engage to circulate and take proper care of them. At the end of two years each loan was called in, and another of different works sent in its place. This scheme was for many years highly successful, and doubtless highly useful; but seems to have failed soon after the death of its projector and inspirer in 1839. The system had the earnest sanction of Lord Brougham, and about 1825 was taken up in some parts of England; and, in a modified form, has had a great success in Melbourne and its neighborhood, in Australia. Stanley Jevons, whose article on the rationale of free public libraries in his “Methods of Social Reform” is one of the most interesting and valuable contributions to the literature of this subject, commends it as the best form of extending free public libraries in the rural portions of Great Britain, and he estimates that there ought to be three thousand such literary itinerants in England and Wales.

This system was copied in this country in the School District Libraries which were started in the state of New York in 1835, and a few years afterward were in successful operation in Massachusetts and other New England states, and in Michigan and Ohio at least, among states further west. At first every school district raising thirty dollars the first year and ten dollars thereafter, by tax or subscription, was assisted by the state—I cite the Massachusetts statute—to a like sum; and a small but choice selection of books sent to it for free circulation within the district. A little later Massachusetts, at least, removed this condition; and supplied every school district with such a library. These libraries after remaining in use for a while, and generally being thoroughly read, were exchanged among the districts. New books were thus continually coming to new readers. This movement was earnestly forwarded by that pioneer among American educators, Horace Mann, and during the period of my boyhood was a godsend to the young people of New England. I want to bless the memory of Samuel Brown, Father Page (a pioneer of the system in New York), and Horace Mann for the gleams of literary light thus cast across the bookless darkness of New England rural homes forty to fifty years ago. This highly economical missionary agency of general intelligence passed away in New England with the incoming of the more satisfactory town system of free libraries. The cause of its decadence elsewhere is not clear, but it has lately had a remarkable resurrection in New York, as we soon shall see.