“ The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as Raphael painted—and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,—which is well said to unite clustered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars. ”

“ This “idol of the market-place” falls to pieces confronted by the facts of social structure. As well might the brain be held silent, the voice of memory dumb, the light of consciousness in darkness by the side of the brute mechanical forces of the body; silence, seclusion, separation from the active life of society, these may be for the exchange and the market-place, the railroad and the factory, vast, dumb mechanic processes which perish in producing, but not for the library—not here, not here. These walls ring with war. They sound with the conflicts of the race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But such as it is, large or small complete or incomplete, a great library to its capacity gives, as this has begun to do, the only measure we have of the recollection of the race. Here we stand face to face not with men or nations, race or people, but with man. Blindly our humanity still struggles to shape its thought, dumb, inarticulate, unconscious, travelling in darkness and laboring in pain, century by century, and generation by generation, in the slow pilgrimage toward the conscious and consecration before it. ”

“ No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for a man to read all the words in the daily Tribune. Nor will any customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from bibliothecal rubbish—or reading which had never been read. ”

“ These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span, yet infinite as space and time? And in what, I pray, are those we gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than the personages of fiction? Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? ”

“ And still to-day the function of the library as a storehouse is most important. Modern democracy holds that knowledge is not for a few bright minds of each generation, not for an intellectual elite; but all that is knowable is to be made accessible to all that desire to know. If we allow knowledge to come only to a chosen few of each generation, how can we know that we have chosen the right ones to receive it? The genius that might turn the stream of history may be born in the lowliest cabin on the prairie, or in the darkest tenement of the great city. ”

“ How many women—reading women, I mean—can put away an unfinished book without a sense of guilt? How many can “browse about” in a library and enjoy doing so? How many really like to read a dictionary or encyclopaedia without ulterior designs upon an article for the women's club, or, at least, without wanting to know something? These are all tests—unconscious, but none the less excellent—of the real readers, of those to whom books are alive and intimate friends. While I have no statistics at hand, I fear that many women most devoted to libraries would fail to reach this standard. ”

“ It is a store, a reservoir, of the new knowledge of the latest day and the ripened wisdom of the long past. To carry into the memory and into the thought of all the people who surround it, in a town, even some little part of what it holds of instructed reasoning and instructed feeling, would be to civilize that community beyond the highest experience of civilization that mankind has yet attained to. There is nothing that stands equally beside it as a possible agent of common culture. It is the one fountain of intellectual life which cannot be exhausted ”

“ Our libraries must not be only storehouses of knowledge, but reservoirs of power. The great books of all time give us contact with inspiring personalities, shining examples, with the great leaders of men. The trophies of Themistocles will not suffer us to sleep. When such books come into many a shut-in life, to many a boyhood, cabined and confined, the limitations of the farm and factory are forgotten, the mind expands to a kinship with past and future, and the reader in some village library may become the prophet of the new century, and the leader of the modern world. ”

“ The peril of the mere aggregate was, perhaps, never plainer than in these days, when the great glacier of democracy slides on, making high places low and low high—one would be glad to believe, preparing the pathway of a new lordship of learning, but one is fain to fear making easy the track and broad the road for an evil over-lordship of mediocrity in learning and in literature. Our own democracy we are assured, has ceased to read anything but fiction, and demands this, not book-meal, but piece-meal, in monthly, weekly, or even daily doses. ”

“ The castle which conservatism is set to defend is the actual state of things, good or bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate. It must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and the vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophets; while innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. ”

“ By what agency can we most effectively elevate our national ideals? By extending and improving our system of popular education, by reversing the usual order and beginning where school curricula now end, by placing our school-children from their earliest years in close and familiar contact with the life and thought of the race as expressed in literature, by exciting in every child admiration and emulation of the world's true heroes, by feeding the imagination and cultivating the moral faculties, by putting every child into the way of acquiring a social and a historic perspective. ”

“ Nor should we forget that the ground of distinction between a “public” library and any other, as the library of a scientific society, a debating society, a theological school or a teachers' club, is that its constituency is not thus limited to a selected class but is broad as humanity itself, with all its enormous inequalities of condition, taste, and mental growth. Like a mirror, therefore, the recorded classified circulation reflects this variety. Even with this apparently almost unmanageable unevenness, appreciable improvement in standards of reading is by no means an unknown experience. ”

“ What can a librarian do to make his library an inspirational force? In the first place he must be as accessible as a turnpike road. It seems to me that he can do more good by talking to people than in any other way. To do this, of course, it is a prerequisite that he should know something. I have no faith in the miserable heresy that a librarian who reads is lost. A librarian who does not read would better not be found in the first place. A librarian who does not read is simply a stable keeper for books. ”

“ Pre-eminently to the young will the myriad-minded library be an oracle in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new key to the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they get jack knives they take to whittling. ”

“ Education is the greatest concern of mankind; it is the foundation of all human progress. The library is an essential factor in all grades of education; and it is the agent plenipotentiary in the betterment of society and the culture and cheer of the human soul. “The highest gift of education is not the mastery of sciences, but noble living, generous character, the spiritual delight that comes from familiarity with the loftiest ideals of the human mind, the spiritual power that saves each generation from the intoxication of its own success. ”

“ The use of books is the one side of learning on which we all claim an opinion. Yet owned, read, written, or wholly laid [Pg 371] aside in a busy life, the use of books, which each of us knows, is individual and personal. Standing to-day in the home of a collection which, we trust, is to be one of the larger libraries of learning, landmark, and lighthouse at once, recording the past and lighting the pathless future, this individual and personal use is inevitable before us, cramping and limiting our conception of the relations, the aims, and the ends of a great library. ”

“ The truth is that a Free Library favours one special section of the community—the book-readers—at the expense of all the rest. The injustice of such an institution is conspicuously apparent when it is remembered that temperaments and tastes are as various as faces. If one man may have his hobby paid for by his neighbours, why not all? Are theatre-goers, lovers of cricket, bicyclists, amateurs of music, and others to have their earnings confiscated, and their capacities for indulging in their own special hobbies curtailed, merely to satisfy gluttons of gratuitous novel-reading? ”

“ We know all too much as Americans of the peril of thinking by the newspapers. German thought has run in the seclusive channel of the academic library to the lack and loss of civic consciousness. Germany was the last of modern states to act as a people. We were the first, the balance and connection between the newspaper and the library, news and liberal letters, the reporter and the professor, cuts up by the roots the frequent conception of the library as a place occult, withheld, untrod; shut apart from practical ends, the grant of society to the scholar—useful to letters, useless to life. ”

“ The literature of interpretation is only second in value to the literature of inspiration. The study even of books of power tends to become scholastic, narrow, provincial, letterwise, and spiritually dead, unless it is quickened and corrected by the fruits of the entire field of critical science. For lack of this more than one sacred book has met a fate which makes one feel, as well kill a book as give it a good name. Even in the teaching of books of power—which of all teaching needs but a soul and the book to awake eternity—the scholar is saved from himself by the library. ”

“ The body is more than an aggregate of cells. The soul wiser than all its faculties. A nation more puissant than any census of its citizens. Man more than men. The secret of this supremacy over the sterile synthesis of sense, the root and germ mastery over the mere mechanics of life, and the bald and barren arithmetic of existence, lies in the capacity to know the present and to remember the past—in consciousness, out of which conscience grows, and in memory, Mnemosyne, mother of all the Muses and parent of all learning. ”

“ This is the modern idea of the library. This great collection, which is not to be secluded, is to be carried and even forced upon the people, so that it shall enter into and become a part of their daily lives.
You remember, perhaps, what Milton says about the books, in that noblest of noble defences of unlicensed printing, that “they are not dead things. As good almost,” he says, “kill a man as you kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable being, made in God's image. Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God as it were, in the eye. ”

“ The fitting and furniture of mind that would make a safe member of society and a good citizen out of the man of small horizons, who lived the narrower life of a generation or two ago, are perilously scant for these times.
It is true that all the wonderful quickening of life which has occurred carries something of education in itself, and that men learn by living under the conditions of the present day; but the learning caught in that way is of the dangerous kind. It is the delusive knowledge of the surface of things; the deceitful lore which breeds mischievous beliefs and makes them fanatical. ”

“ The Lord, with a smile of pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakála goes back to earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue's end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends, and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in. ”

“ The library which you to-day dedicate to the perpetual service of the people, and which we may believe will continue as long as society lasts here to do its serene and beneficient work for the instruction and delight of innumerable generations of mankind—this library represents the latest, and I think we may say the most perfect and the final term in a process of library evolution, which has been going forward on this continent for more than two hundred years, and has involved, as we have seen, countless struggles and failures and sacrifices for the production of this single result. ”

“ People come to libraries from all sorts of homes. To the man or woman living in the midst of ugly and sordid surroundings, where the days are crowded with drudgery, the weekly visit to the library becomes a social event; it is a lift into a fresh atmosphere, into another plane of life. A passing greeting from the information desk gives a sense of welcome and of relationship to the reading public. Five or ten minutes of cordial contact, a brief conversation with one unrelated to their world of worries, is a refreshing experience. ”

“ We talk about the people being hungry for books and information. Have you found it so? Then why do we have free libraries and free schools? People are willing to sacrifice for something that they are very hungry for. Do you hunger and thirst to read Homer and Shakespeare, and Emerson and Arnold, and good histories and literature? Do you, when you are tired after a day's work, take home a scientific work or a treatise on civics? No, you are just a little sample of the public, and you think you need to read a pleasant, entertaining, restful book. ”

“ With the era of the democratic free libraries, with their more rapid growth, with their doors open to men, women and children of all classes, the human element, the personal relation of librarian to the reader suffered a gradual eclipse, until, in some libraries more perfectly developed on the technical side, the personal equation vanished altogether. The library became a great machine, into which a number was dropped, and out of which a book was dropped like corn from the hopper. We all know how formidable this mechanism is to those unaccustomed to modern library methods. ”

“ I have myself heard the suggestion in regard to this library, and from one of academic connection, that its future usefulness would be increased if its future bulk were restricted. Whether we listen to the philosopher, the editor, or the university trustee; whatever fanned and winnowed opinions we apply to the great threshing floor on whose round the feet of the ages slowly tread out the wheat from the chaff in the garnered harvest of human thought, the remnant will be small—measured by high thought or narrow utility. ”