The bookless man does not understand his own loss. He does not know the leanness in which his mind is kept by want of the food which he rejects. He does not know what starving of imagination and of thought he has inflicted upon himself. He has suffered his interest in the things which make up God's knowable universe to shrink until it reaches no farther than his eyes can see and his ears can hear. The books which he scorns are the telescopes and reflectors and reverberators of our intellectual life, holding in themselves a hundred magical powers for the overcoming of space and time, and for giving the range of knowledge which belongs to a really cultivated mind. There is no equal substitute for them. There is nothing else which will so break for us the poor hobble of everyday sights and sounds and habits and tasks, by which our thinking and feeling are naturally tethered to a little worn round.
J. N. LARNED.
THE LIBRARY'S EDUCATIONAL MISSION
To the great mass of boys and girls the school can barely give the tools with which to get an education before they are forced to begin their life work as breadwinners. Few are optimistic enough to hope that we can change this condition very rapidly. The great problem of the day is, therefore, to carry on the education after the elementary steps have been taken in the free public schools. There are numerous agencies at work in this direction—reading rooms, reference and lending libraries, museums, summer, vacation and night schools, correspondence and other forms of extension teaching; but by far the greatest agent is good reading. An educational system which contents itself with teaching to read and then fails to see that the best reading is provided, when undesirable reading is so cheap and plentiful as to be a constant menace to the public good, is as inconsistent and absurd as to teach our children the expert use of the knife, fork and spoon, and then provide them with no food. The most important movement before the professional educators to-day, is the broadening going on so rapidly in their duties to their profession and to the public. Too many have thought of their work as limited to schools for the young during a short period of tuition. The true conception is that we should be responsible for higher as well as elementary education, for adults as well as for children, for educational work in the homes as well as in the schoolhouses, and during life as well as for a limited course. In a nutshell, the motto of the extended work should be "higher education for adults, at home, during life."
MELVIL DEWEY.
THE FREEDOM OF BOOKS
The free town library is wholly a product of the last half century. It is the crowning creature of democracy for its own higher culture. There is nothing conceivable to surpass it as an agency in popular education. Schools, colleges, lectures, classes, clubs and societies, scientific and literary, are tributaries to it—primaries, feeders. It takes up the work of all of them to utilize it, to carry it on, and make more of it. Future time will perfect it, and will perfect the institutions out of which and over which it has grown; but it is not possible for the future to bring any new gift of enlightenment to men that will be greater, in kind, than the free diffusion of thought and knowledge as stored in the better literature of the world.
The true literature that we garner in our libraries is the deathless thought, the immortal truth, the imperishable quickenings and revelations which genius—the rare gift to now and then one of the human race—has been frugally, steadily planting in the fertile soil of written speech, from the generations of the hymn writers of the Euphrates and the Indus to the generations now alive. There is nothing save the air we breathe that we have common rights in so sacred and so clear, and there is no other public treasure which so reasonably demands to be kept and cared for and distributed for common enjoyment at common cost.
Free corn in old Rome bribed a mob and kept it passive. By free books and what goes with them in modern America we mean to erase the mob from existence. There lies the cardinal difference between a civilization which perished and a civilization that will endure.