THE LEVY OF LIBRARY TRIBUTE
The above title was constructed by the editor from a sentence in the presidential address of Henry M. Utley before the American Library Association at its Denver conference of 1895. President Utley himself gave it no title, but it is an examination of the claims of the library to public support, with a conclusion that those claims are justified only by regarding the library as an educational institution, using this term in its broadest sense.
Henry Munson Utley was born at Plymouth, Mich., Aug. 5, 1836. He served on the staff of the Detroit Free Press in 1861-66, was city editor of the Post and Post-Tribune until 1881, and then, after holding the secretaryship of the Detroit Board of Education, became in 1885 librarian of the Public Library, in which post he served until his death on Feb. 16, 1917, becoming librarian emeritus in 1913.
We are met for the seventeenth Conference of the American Library Association in the Capital city of the Centennial State. It is a pleasing co-incidence that the Association and the State celebrate the same natal year. Within the memory of some of us the whole region of which this city is now the metropolis was a wilderness. The century was fairly begun when Lieut. Pike led his little band to the sources of the Arkansas and made his futile attempt to scale the lofty peak which now bears his name. Forty years later came the explorations of Fremont, and then fifteen years elapsed before the tide of immigration set in. The desert of that day has been converted into prosperous farms. Thriving towns have sprung up in the mountain fastnesses, at the gateway to which sits this Queen City of the plains, displaying all the evidences of wealth, culture, and refinement to be found in the proud cities to the eastward.
This rapid and wonderful transformation has been the work of human hands guided by intelligent brains and an indomitable spirit of pluck and perseverance. We are accustomed to think of this combination as purely American. In many of its characteristics it certainly is so. And in no respect more distinctively so than in the cause in which we are most interested. Not all the older commonwealths, even on this side of the Atlantic, have yet accepted the theory that the education of the citizen is the concern of the state. But in all this newer portion of our country this doctrine has been incorporated into the fundamental law. The ordinance of 1787 for the government of the territory northwest of the Ohio river declared that for obvious reasons schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged. The twenty states now organized within this and the subsequently acquired territory to the westward have all accepted to the fullest extent the doctrine of the ordinance. They have not only carried it into practical effect by general laws providing for free public schools for children, for universities and institutions of higher learning for the education of youth, but have also provided for the establishment and maintenance of free public libraries at the general expense and for the common use of all the people.
Let us consider very briefly the theory upon which the state assumes to levy tribute upon the property of individuals to provide means for maintaining libraries. By what right does the state tax the man of wealth to put miscellaneous books into the hands of the man who pays no tax?
So far as primary education is concerned, the basis seems clear. The free state which depends for its very existence upon the intelligence of the masses of its citizens must, as a measure of self-defense, provide the facilities by which all may become intelligent. Self-preservation is the supremest natural law. Whatever has a right to exist has a right to do that which is necessary to preserve its existence. The free state which rests on the suffrage of its citizens is bound in duty to itself to see to it that popular education, which is essential to its perpetuity, is universal. Ignorant men are not competent to take care of themselves and their households, still less to direct the destinies of an empire. The state has, therefore, the right, not only to provide the means of education, but to compel education. Laws are in force which require certain attendance upon the schools. These rest on the theory that the interest of the state in the education of the individual surpasses that of the individual, and therefore, the state cannot, in justice to itself, treat education purely as a matter of individual concern.
It is a notorious fact that the average person does not perceive the importance of self-cultivation. As the vineyard left to itself is soon choked out with weeds and chapparall, so man if left to himself lapses naturally into his primitive condition. The state cannot leave him to himself, but must interpose to make it certain that he acquires the best degree of information which his natural abilities and the time not necessary to his self-support shall permit. Neither can the state leave the matter of providing facilities and inducements to education to private enterprise, nor to the church, which has been the foremost of all organizations to appreciate its importance. While the state recognizes these agencies and accepts them as satisfactory, so far as they go, it nevertheless fully equips schools of its own, in pursuance of its inherent right and duty, which cannot be relinquished to any other agency.
The extent to which the state shall go in the matter of educating its citizens has been the subject of much discussion. There are those who maintain that as the education of the individual proceeds his concern in his own development increases, until finally, if his education proceeds far enough, his concern in his own development surpasses that of the state, and he must thenceforth be left to equip himself entirely at his own expense. If that point is marked by the line between primary and secondary, or between secondary and higher education, there is where the state is in duty bound to stop. The extent of the interest of the community as compared with that of the individual is held to grow less and less and finally to disappear as he advances.