The many-sidedness of this catalog points also to the manifold functions of the public library. It is meant to raise the educational level of the people, and this can be done in three ways: first, interest may be stimulated along new lines; second, those who wish to perfect themselves in their own subjects or in whatsoever special topics, may be provided with technical literature; and third, the general desire for literary entertainment may be satisfied by books of the best or at least not of the worst sort. The directors of libraries see their duties to lie in all three directions. The libraries guide the tastes and interests of the general public, and try to replace the ordinary servant-girl's novel with the best romance of the day and shallow literature with works that are truly instructive. And no community is quite content until its public library has become a sort of general meeting-place and substitute for the saloon and the club. America is the working-man's paradise, and attractive enough to the rich man; but the ordinary man of the middle classes, who in Germany finds his chief comfort in the Bierhalle would find little comfort in America if it were not for the public library, which offers him a home. Thus the public library has come to be a recognized instrument of culture along with the public school; and in all American outposts the school teacher and librarian are among the pioneers.
The learned library cannot do this. To be sure, the university library can help to spread information, and conversely the public library makes room for thousands of volumes on all sorts of scientific topics. But the emphasis is laid very differently in the two cases, and if it were not so neither library would best fulfil its purpose. The extreme quiet of the reference library and the bustle and stir of the public library do not go together. In the one direction America has followed the dignified traditions of Europe; in the other, it has opened new paths and travelled on at a rapid pace. Every year discovers new ideas and plans, new schemes for equipment and the selection of books, for cataloging, and for otherwise gaining in utility. When, for instance, the library in Providence commenced to post a complete list of books and writings pertaining to the subject of every lecture that was given in the city, it was the initiation of a great movement. The juvenile departments are the product of recent years, and are constantly increasing in popularity. There are even, in some cases, departments for blind readers. The state commissions are new, and so also the travelling libraries, which are carried from one village to another.
The great schools for librarians are also new. The German librarian is mostly a scholar; but the American believes that he has improved on the European library systems, not so much by his ample financial resources as by having broken with the academic custom, and having secured librarians with a special library training. And since there are such officials in many thousand libraries, and the great institutions create a constant demand for such persons, the library schools, which offer generally a three years' course, having been found very successful.
Admittedly, all this technical apparatus is expensive; the Boston library expends every year a quarter of a million dollars for administrative expenses. But the American taxpayer supports this more gladly than any other burden, knowing that the public library is the best weapon against alcoholism and crime, against corruption and discontent, and that the democratic country can flourish only when the instinct of self-perfection as it exists in every American is thoroughly satisfied.
[numbered blank page]
BOOKS AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
This paper and the two that follow it relate specifically to reading as fostered by the public library and yet not sufficiently to the provision of books to the public as a definite library service to warrant postponing them to the section relating to that branch of community service. They have a somewhat academic or “literary flavor,” and yet are permeated not with the idea of “books for scholars” but with that of “books for people”—the idea of reading as a universal function—duty, pleasure and inspiration in one—which is distinctly that of a socialized library. The first paper is an address made by Lowell at the opening of the new public library building at Chelsea, Mass., Dec. 22, 1885.
James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819, and graduated at Harvard in 1838, succeeding Longfellow as professor of Literature there in 1855. He edited The North American Review in 1863-72, served as U.S. minister to Spain in 1877-80 and to Great Britain in 1880-85. He died in Cambridge, Aug. 12, 1891.
“A few years ago my friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland, published a very interesting volume which he called “The book-lover's euchiridion,” the handbook, that is to say, of those who love books. It was made up of extracts from the writings of a great variety of distinguished men, ancient and modern, in praise of books. It was a chorus of many voices in many tongues, a hymn of gratitude and praise, full of such piety and fervor as can be parelleled only in songs dedicated to the supreme power, the supreme wisdom and the supreme love. Nay, there is a glow of enthusiasm and sincerity in it which is often painfully wanting in those other too commonly mechanical compositions. We feel at once that here it is out of the fulness of the heart, yes, and of the head, too, that the mouth speaketh. Here was none of that compulsory commonplace which is wont to characterize those ‘testimonials of celebrated authors,’ by means of which publishers sometimes strive to linger out the passages of a hopeless book toward its requiescat in oblivion. These utterances which Mr. Ireland has gathered lovingly together are stamped with that spontaneousness which is the mint mark of all sterling speech. It is true that they are mostly, as is only natural, the utterances of literary men, and there is a well-founded proverbial distrust of herring that bear only the brand of the packer, and not that of the sworn inspector. But to this objection a cynic might answer with the question, ‘Are authors so prone, then, to praise the works of other people that we are to doubt them when they do it un-asked?’ Perhaps the wisest thing I could have done to-night would have been to put upon the stand some of the more weighty of this cloud of witnesses. But since your invitation implied that I should myself say something, I will endeavor to set before you a few of the commonplaces of the occasion, as they may be modified by passing through my own mind, or by having made themselves felt in my own experience.
The greater part of Mr. Ireland's witnesses testify to the comfort and consolation they owe to books, to the refuge they have found in them from sorrow or misfortune, to their friendship, never estranged and outliving all others. This testimony they volunteered. Had they been asked, they would have borne evidence as willingly to the higher and more general uses of books in their service to the commonwealth, as well as to the individual man. Consider, for example, how a single page of Burke may emancipate the young student of politics from narrow views and merely contemporaneous judgments. Our English ancestors, with that common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that:
“When land and goods are gone and spent,
Then learning is most excellent”;
and this is true, so far as it goes, though it goes, perhaps, hardly far enough. The law also calls only the earth and what is immovably attached to it real property, but I am of opinion that those only are real possessions which abide with a man after he has been stripped of those others falsely so called, and which alone save him from