The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

Nearly all the objections to public libraries which have been expressed in this country—and these appear more frequently in private conversation than in the public prints—may be classed under three heads:

1. The universal dread of taxation. Libraries cost money. In every city and town of the land there is a feeling that the present rate of taxation is all that the property and business of the place will bear. This feeling existed before the taxes were one half their present rates. There is a generous rivalry among our cities and towns in the maintenance of good schools; and localities which furnish the best facilities for education are regarded as the most desirable places for residence. Viewed simply as a matter of public economy, no city can afford to dispense with its educational system, or to permit it to degenerate. The public library also should be maintained as the supplement of the public school, carrying forward the education of the people from the point where the public school leaves it.

2. There are certain theoretical objections offered to the establishment and maintenance of public libraries. One is that the library tax bears unequally upon the people. Some persons do not care to read books, and others prefer to pay for their own reading. The same objection is quite as valid against any system of public education. To lay the burden of education uniformly upon property, and to tax the owner who has no children, or, having children, prefers to educate them at private schools, is another glaring instance of inequality. No taxation for the maintenance of public health, the introduction of water and gas, the construction of roads, bridges, and sewers, bears equally upon every member of the community. If perfect equality in the distribution of these burdens were a necessity, an organized municipality would be an impossibility.

Perhaps the most popular objection to public libraries is the one urged by the few disciples of Herbert Spencer—that government has no legitimate function except the protection of person and property, as the original compact of society is simply for the purpose of protection. All else is paternal, pertains to the commune, and tends to perpetual antagonism. The government may support a police, courts of justice, prisons, penitentiaries, and similar institutions, and can do nothing else.

How are the people under this theory to be educated? The reply is explicit: Unless they will educate themselves, they are not to be educated. How is the public health to be maintained? It is not to be maintained by any interference of government. Who is to build bridges and sewers and lay out public parks? Nobody. Imagine, if it be possible, a community where such a Utopian theory was carried out. Such a government fortunately does not, and never did, exist on the face of the globe. The “general welfare”—which includes protection—is expressly stated in the preamble of the national constitution to be the purpose of our government, and the same expression is found in nearly all the state constitutions. What ever the people desire, and whatever will, in their judgment, conduce to the general welfare, is a legitimate subject for governmental action. “The only orthodox object of the institution of government,” says Mr. Jefferson, “is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.” Herbert Spencer wrote his “Social Statics” before the British Parliament passed an act for the support of public libraries. Mr. Ewart's bill was then before Parliament; and Mr. Spencer, in that work, took occasion to fling a sneer at it. In the preface of his American edition, written in 1864, he states, without remodelling the text, that “the work does not accurately represent his present opinions.”

3. The third and last class of objections to public libraries to which I shall direct your attention relates to the kind and quality of books circulated. These objections, which are usually made by educated and scholarly persons, are based on an entire misconception of the facts in the case. The objectors do not divest themselves of the old idea that libraries are established for the exclusive benefit of scholars; whereas the purpose of these is to furnish reading for all classes in the community. On no other principle would a general tax for their support be justifiable. The masses of a community have very little of literary and scholarly culture. They need more of this culture, and the purpose of the library is to develop and increase it. This is done by placing in their hands such books as they can read with pleasure and appreciate, and by stimulating them to acquire the habit of reading. We must first interest the reader before we can educate him; and, to this end, must commence at his own standard of intelligence. The scholar, in his pride of intellect, forgets the progressive steps he took in his own mental development—the stories read to him in the nursery, the boy's book of adventure in which he revelled with delight, and the sentimental novel over which he shed tears in his youth. Our objector supposes that the masses will read books of his standard if they were not supplied with the books to which he objects; but he is mistaken. Shut up to this choice, they will read no books. When the habit of reading is once acquired, the reader's taste, and hence the quality of his reading, progressively improve.

The standard histories, technical works of science, and even Shakespeare's plays and Milton's “Paradise Lost,” are sealed books to a larger portion of every community than are willing to acknowledge the fact. “When a Boy,” said John Quincy Adams, “I attempted ten times to read Milton's ‘Paradise Lost.’ I was mortified, even to the shedding of tears, that I could not conceive what it was that my father and mother so much admired in that book. I smoked tobacco and read Milton at the same time, and for the same motive: to find out what was the recondite charm in them that gave my father so much pleasure. After making myself sick four or five times with smoking, I mastered that accomplishment; but I did not master Milton. I was nearly thirty years of age when I first read ‘Paradise Lost’ with delight and astonishment.”

If our objectors mourn over the standard of books which are read by the public, they may be consoled by the fact that, as a rule, people read books better than themselves, and hence are benefited by reading. A book of a lower intellectual or moral standard than the reader's is thrown aside in disgust, to be picked up and read by a person still lower in the scale of mental and moral development.

I do not lament, or join in the clamor sometimes raised, over the statistics of prose fiction circulated at public libraries. Why this lamentation over one specific form of fiction? The writers of such prose fiction as is found in our libraries were as eminent and worthy men and women as the writers of poetical fiction, dramatic fiction, or, I might add, the fiction which passes in the world as history and biography. History professes to relate actual events, biography to describe actual lives, and science to unfold and explain natural laws and physical phenomena. Fiction treats these and other subjects, mental, moral, sentimental, and divine, from an ideal or artistic standpoint; and the great mass of readers prefer to take their knowledge in this form. More is known to-day of the history and traditions of Scotland, and of the social customs of London, from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens than from all the histories of those localities. Fiction is the art element in literature, and the most enduring monuments of genius in the literature of any people are works of the imagination.