The Library and Society Part 8

THE NEW YORK FREE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

ADDRESS IN ITS FAVOR AT A PUBLIC MEETING

President Cleveland made this address on March 6, 1890, while a resident of New York City in the interval between his two presidential terms, at a meeting, at Chickering Hall, called for the purpose of directing attention to the work of the struggling Free Circulating Library and if possible to raise funds for its support, which was only partially insured by the City. Owing to increase in both public and private contributions this library was enabled to make rapid growth in the years immediately following until in 1901, when it was merged in the Circulation Department of the New York Public Library, it was operating eleven branches with a circulation of over 600,000. This inst.i.tution was the pioneer of the popular, as distinguished from the scholarly, library idea in New York.

[Stephen] Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell, N.J., March 18, 1837, the fifth son of a Presbyterian clergyman.

He received a common-school education and after his father's death went in 1855 to live with an uncle in Buffalo, N.Y. He was admitted to the bar there in 1859, was a.s.sistant district attorney in 1863-66, sheriff in 1871-74 and mayor in 1882. In the latter year he was elected Governor of New York and in 1884 President of the United States. He was an unsuccessful candidate for re-election in 1888, but was elected again in 1892. He died in Princeton, N.J., where he had resided since his last presidential term, on June 24, 1908.

The words I shall speak on this occasion I intend rather as a pledge of my adherance to the cause in which you are enlisted than an attempt to say anything new or instructive. I gladly join with the enthusiasm of a new convert in the felicitations of those who have done n.o.ble and effective work in the establishment and maintenance in our city of a free circulating library, and it seems to me they have abundant cause for congratulation in review of the good which has already been accomplished through their efforts and in the contemplation of the further usefulness which awaits their continued endeavor.

In every enlightened country the value of popular education is fully recognized, not only as a direct benefit to its recipients, but as an element of strength and safety in organized society. Considered in these aspects it should nowhere be better appreciated than in this land of free inst.i.tutions consecrated to the welfare and happiness of its citizens, and deriving its sanction and its power from the people. Here the character of the people is inevitably impressed upon the government, and here our public life can no more be higher and purer than the life of the people, than a stream can rise above its fountain or be purer than the spring in which it has its source.

That we have not failed to realize these conditions is demonstrated by the establishment of free public schools on every side, where children are not only invited but often obliged to submit themselves to such instruction as will better their situation in life and fit them to take part intelligently in the conduct of the government.

Thus, in our schools the young are taught to read, and in this manner the seed is sown, from which we expect a profitable return to the state, when its beneficiaries shall repay the educational advances made to them by an intelligent and patriotic performance of their social and political duties.

And yet if we are to create good citizens.h.i.+p, which is the object of popular education, and if we are to insure to the country the full benefit of public instruction, we can by no means consider the work as completely done in the schoolroom. While the young gathered there are fitting themselves to a.s.sume in the future their political obligations, there are others upon whom these obligations already rest, and who now have the welfare and safety of the country in their keeping. Our work is badly done if these are neglected. They have pa.s.sed the school age, and have perhaps availed themselves of free instruction; but they, as well as those still in the school, should, nevertheless, have within their reach the means of further mental improvement and the opportunity of gaining that additional knowledge and information which can only be secured by access to useful and instructive books.

The husbandman who expects to gain a profitable return from his orchards, not only carefully tends and cultivates the young trees in his nurseries as they grow to maturity but he generously enriches and cares for those in bearing and upon which he must rely for ripened fruit.

Teaching the children of our land to read is but the first step in the scheme of creating good citizens by means of free instruction. We teach the young to read so that both as children and as men and women they may read. Our teaching must lead to the habit and the desire of reading to be useful; and only as this result is reached can the work in our free schools be logically supplemented and made valuable.

Therefore, the same wise policy and intent which open the doors of our free schools to our young, also suggest the completion of the plan thus entered upon by placing books in the hands of those who in our schools have been taught to read.

A man or woman who never reads and is abandoned to unthinking torpor, or who allows the entire mental life to be bounded by the narrow lines of the daily recurring routine of effort for mere existence, cannot escape a condition of barrenness of mind, which not only causes the decay of individual contentment and happiness, but which fails to yield to the state its justly expected return of usefulness in valuable service and wholesome political action.

Another branch of this question should not be overlooked. It is not only of great importance that our youth and our men and women should have the ability, the desire, and the opportunity to read, but the kind of books they read is no less important. Without guidance and without the invitation and encouragement to read publications which will improve as well as interest, there is danger that our people will have in their hands books whose influence and tendency are of a negative sort, if not positively bad and mischievous. Like other good things, the ability and opportunity to read may be so used as to defeat their beneficient purposes.

The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible to the young will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not tend to make him a useful member of society.

The man who devotes himself to the flash literature now much too common will, instead of increasing his value as a citizen, almost surely degenerate in his ideas of public duty and grow dull in appreciation of the obligations he owes his country.

In both these cases there will be a loss to the state. There is danger also that a positive and aggressive injury to the community will result, and such readers will certainly suffer deprivation to the happiness and contentment which are the fruits of improving study and well-regulated thought.

So, too, the young woman who seeks recreation and entertainment in reading silly and frivolous books, often of doubtful moral tendency, is herself in the way of becoming frivolous and silly, if not of weak morality. If she escapes this latter condition, she is certain to become utterly unfitted to bear patiently the burden of self-support or to a.s.sume the sacred duties of wife and mother.

Contemplating these truths, no one can doubt the importance of securing for those who read, as far as it is in our power, facilities for the study and reading of such books as will instruct and innocently entertain, and which will at the same time improve and correct the tastes and habits.

There is another thought somewhat in advance of those already suggested, which should not pa.s.s unnoticed.

As an outgrowth of the inventive and progressive spirit of our people, we have among us legions of men, and women, too, who restlessly desire to increase their knowledge of the new forces and agencies which at this time are being constantly dragged from their lurking-places and subjected to the use of man. Those earnest inquirers should all be given a chance and have put within their reach such books as will guide and inspire their efforts. If by this means the country shall gain to itself a new inventor or be the patron of endeavor which shall add new elements to the sum of human happiness and comfort, its intervention will be well repaid.

These considerations, and the fact that many among us having the ability and inclination to read are unable to furnish themselves with profitable and wholesome books amply justify the beneficient mission of our Free Circulating Library. Its plan and operation, so exactly adjusted to meet a situation which cannot safely be ignored and to wants which ought not to be neglected, establish its claim upon the encouragement and reasonable aid of the public authorities and commend it most fully to the support and generosity of private benefaction.

The development which this good work has already reached in our city has exhibited the broad field yet remaining untouched and the inadequacy of present operations. It has brought to view also instances of n.o.ble individual philanthropy and disinterested private effort and contribution.

But it certainly seems that the time and money directed towards this object are confined to a circle of persons far too narrow, and that the public encouragement and aid have been greatly disproportioned to private endeavor.

The city of New York has never shown herself willing to be behind other cities in such work as is done by our Free Circulating Library, and while her people are much engrossed in business activity and enterprise they have never yet turned away from a cause once demonstrated to them to be so worthy and useful as this.

The demonstration is at hand. Let it be pressed upon our fellow citizens, and let them be shown the practical operation of the project you have in hand and the good it has accomplished, and the further good of which it is capable through their increased liberality, and it will be strange if they fail to respond generously to your appeal to put the city of New York in the front rank of the cities which have recognized the usefulness of the free circulating libraries.

THE WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM

ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF ITS LIBRARY IN HARTFORD, CONN., JAN. 2, 1893.

These addresses, by Charles Dudley Warner and Charles H.

Clark, are reprinted from brief abstracts given in _The Library Journal_ of January, 1893.

Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plainfield, Ma.s.s., Sept.

12, 1829 and graduated at Hamilton College in 1851. He practised law in Chicago in 1856-60 and in 1861 became managing editor of the Hartford, Conn., _Press_. In 1867 on its consolidation with the _Courant_, he became co-editor.

He was made a.s.sociate editor of _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884, and died at Hartford, Oct. 20, 1900. He was widely popular as an essayist, first gaining favorable notice by his "My Summer in a Garden."

This building and its contents are contributory to the excellence and enjoyment of life exactly as Bushnall Park is--not merely that it is a place of rest and recreation, but it is a training in beauty, in the appreciation of n.o.bleness, and in the public and private refinement.

Culture is a plant of rather slow growth. I suppose there never was such a change wrought, almost instantaneously, in a people as was wrought in the American people by the opening and exhibition of the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Its effect was at once apparent everywhere. But knowledge precedes culture, culture being, after all, but another name for educational taste.

Now this inst.i.tution is simply a means for the culture of the city of Hartford, in all ways, because literature and art--not taken externally, but absorbed as a part of our lives, not only of knowledge, but of experience--are the things that make life worth living.

No one can speak too highly of the offices of a great library. It was one of our great essayists, you remember, who said that the monastery--speaking of it with reference to its books--was the ark that floated down over the tempest and darkness of the middle ages, in order to carry cla.s.sic learning to the fifteenth century. They were repositories of learning. That is the old idea. And for a long time--almost to our day--that was the notion of the library. It was a place to put something away. It was not even like a market for the sale of provisions or eggs; indeed, if they were eggs the librarians thought it their duty to sit on them, with the idea that they might hatch out other books. That was a n.o.ble thing to do. But much better than that is to scatter these books abroad among the people, so that we shall not have reproduction--an egg for an egg--but that these books will so revivify the life that we shall have books new, that express the actual conditions and that appeal to the human life as it is. 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 n.o.blest of n.o.ble 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 G.o.d's image.

Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of G.o.d as it were, in the eye. Many a man," he goes on to say, "lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so that if we slay a good book we would slay immortality rather than a life."

Charles Hopkins Clark, who immediately followed Mr. Warner, was at this time editor in chief of _The Hartford Courant_, of which Mr. Warner was co-editor. Mr. Clark was born in Hartford April 1, 1848, graduated at Yale, and joined the _Courant_ staff in 1871, becoming editor in 1890.

One of the earliest sins of my youth, or rather one of the earliest that is burnt into my memory, was committed in the library of what was then the Young Men's Inst.i.tute. I spoke out loud! The rebuke that I received sent me down the stairs overwhelmed with a sense of the enormity of my crime, yet more than sustained by joy to think that I had escaped the utter annihilation with which my reprimand was freighted. And I can say that the awe with which I used to enter that chamber of silence, and the fear with which I regarded the librarian were the common property of all the young people of that somewhat remote period. But long since we found out that the old librarian was one of the gentlest and most inoffensive men, and that we had misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood us.

But I have no such gloomy recollection, nor to be honest, have I any recollection at all of the Wadsworth Athenaeum gallery, because, like everybody else who then lived in Hartford, I never went in there. The door was often open and the only sentinel on guard had no more formidable weapon than a pair of knitting-needles. But no one ever crossed that threshold. The simple legend, traced on a placard at the door, "Admission Ten Cents," did the business, or rather, to be more elegant as well as accurate, prevented any business being done. The people who came up the stone steps read the notice and turned off to the left to the library or to the right to the Historical Society, where entrance was free. I say free, but freedom must have its limits if we are to have safety, so the tin sign on the outside of the door gave notice to the always unwelcome boy that he could not go in until he reached the mature age of twelve years. That was one of the things that I wanted to grow to full manhood for.

And I well remember my first visit there. As I walked slowly up the stairs I wondered what venerable monument of patriotic achievement, what new inspiration to love for our n.o.ble State whose history is such a priceless treasure, what vision of heroic self-sacrifice in her behalf would first burst upon my eager eyes when I should look around the hall.

I looked and lo! there in a gla.s.s jar stood the chaste but familiar figure of Charles Hosmer's night-blooming cereus--the modest pioneer of the canned-fruit industry in this community.

I have made this brief review in order to suggest to you the state of innocuous desuetude in which for more or less time the various miscalled interests in this building had been lying for lack of any interest at all. The library had a limited and dwindling clientage. The Athenaeum was deserted. The Historical Society, with no funds and few friends, was exhibiting a collection of animal, vegetable, and mineral curiosities, while its real treasures of history and truth were by lock and key shut off from the very public for whom they were collected and preserved.

Look at that picture, then look at this which greets us here to day.

In these elegant and s.p.a.cious buildings the whole public of Hartford is welcome, without money and without price. The circulating library will furnish every home with books, and Miss Hewins, who has devoted her life to this town, is always ready to help the younger readers. The Library of Reference, monument alike to Mr. Watkinson's liberality and Dr.

Trumbull's rare judgment and life-long devoted service as a librarian, offers free to all students the authorities on every branch of knowledge. The Historical Society, with improved facilities, has been able to adopt a more liberal policy, and is widening its claim upon public interest, and so increasing its usefulness, and, thanks largely to the women of Hartford, the Art Gallery and Art School are ready to spread their refining and wholesome influence all through this community.

LIBRARIES AS LEAVEN