SOME POPULAR OBJECTIONS TO PUBLIC LIBRARIES

This is probably the first treatment of the subject in this country, and is the leading article in the second number of The American Library Journal, as it was then called. The writer, William F. Poole was at the time librarian of the Chicago Public Library. He mentioned objections only to explain them away. It will be noted that none of them would be described at present as “popular,” and that only the third is now much heard.

William Frederick Poole was born in Salem, Mass., 1821, and graduated at Yale in 1849, where as librarian of the Linonian and Brothers Library he founded Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, by which his name is chiefly remembered. He was librarian of the Chicago Public Library in 1873-87, and at his death, March 1, 1894, he was librarian of the Newberry Library, Chicago, whose building he designed on the departmental system, of which he was an earnest advocate. He was the second president of the American Library Association, serving in 1885-87.

In this paper I shall use the term “public libraries” as meaning free municipal libraries organized under State laws and supported by general taxation. This definition will exclude from our notice a large number of libraries established on other foundations, some of them richly endowed and partially accessible to the public.

The rapid increase in the number and importance of public libraries, both in this country and in England, is perhaps the most marked feature of educational development during the past twenty-five years; for within that brief period the first of them was opened to the public.

My subject, as announced in the programme, requires me to speak of popular objections; yet I must confess that popular appreciation of these institutions, where they have been established, would have furnished a more attractive theme. As their foundation involves taxation, that prolific source of political controversy, it is somewhat remarkable that in the eleven States of our Union where public-library statutes have been enacted, so little public discussion has occurred, and so few objections have been offered. I have heard of no instance where such a bill was proposed in a State legislature and was defeated. That all the Northern States, where general education and the common-school system are established, have not by legislation provided also for the public library—the natural ally and supplement of that system—is doubtless owing to the fact that the people have not asked for such legislation. The unanimity of the vote by which towns have accepted taxation for the support of public libraries is significant. The Commissioner of Education at Washington recently made inquiries on this point, and received replies from 37 towns and cities. In 32 of these the vote was unanimous; in 5 there was a divided sentiment, but the vote was 1730 in favor to 515 against taxation. The vote of the rate-payers in some English towns and cities where free libraries have been established was as follows:

Ayes.Noes.

Manchester396240

Winchester33713

Bolton66255

Cambridge87378

Oxford59672

Sheffield838232

Kidderminster10811

Blackburn17002

Dundee, no dissentient.

By the latest statistics of the Bureau of Education, it appears that there are 188 public libraries in eleven of the United States. Of these five are Eastern States—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut; five are Western States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa: and one is a Southern State—Texas. Eight of these States have passed public-library statutes within the past ten years. In the number of libraries the States rank as follows: Massachusetts, 127; Illinois, 14; New Hampshire, 13; Ohio, 9; Maine, 8; Vermont, Connecticut, and Wisconsin, 4 each; Indiana, 3; Iowa and Texas, 1 each. In the number of volumes they rank as follows (in round numbers): Massachusetts, 920,000; Ohio, 144,000; Illinois, 77,000; New Hampshire, 52,000; Maine, 34,000; Indiana, 26,000; Vermont, 16,000; Connecticut, 15,000; Texas, 10,000; Wisconsin, 6000; Iowa, 1000. The aggregate number of volumes in these libraries is 1,300,000, and their annual aggregate circulation is 4,735,000 volumes. It is noticeable that no one of these libraries is in New York, Pennsylvania, or any of the Middle States. The representatives from those States in this Conference may be able to account for this hiatus in the statistics of the Bureau of Education.

In this brief sketch of the statistics of our American public libraries we have not found much evidence of popular objections to their inception and organization. In England, however, where the questions of national schools, secular schools, and parochial schools are still mooted, the idea of levying a general tax for the support of a library free to all, and furnished with books adapted to the capacities of all classes, was not in harmony with the traditions and public policy of that people. In 1848, the same year that the Legislature of Massachusetts, at the suggestion of Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston, passed an act authorizing the city of Boston to maintain a public library, Mr. William Ewart, member of Parliament, moved in the House of Commons for a committee of inquiry respecting libraries. Such a committee was raised, and Mr. Ewart was appointed chairman. Much evidence was taken; a report was made; and in February, 1850, a bill was introduced into the House of Commons enabling town councils to establish public libraries and museums. “Our younger brethren, the people of the United States,” says the report, “have already anticipated us in the formation of libraries entirely open to the public.” The bill proposed limited the rate of taxation to one halfpenny in the pound; required the affirmative vote of two thirds of the rate-payers; restricted its operation to towns which had at least ten thousand inhabitants; and provided that the money so raised should be expended only in building and contingent expenses. This bill, meagre indeed compared with the later enactments of Parliament, met persistent opposition from the conservative benches. An ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer objected because it did not give sufficient powers to form a library; and he should object to it more strongly if it did. Who was to select the books? Was every publication that issued from the press to be procured? or was there to be a censorship introduced? Another member claimed that the bill would enable a few persons to tax the general body of rate-payers for their own benefit, and the library would degenerate into a political club. Col. Sibthorp thought that, however excellent food for the mind might be, food for the body was more needed by the people. “I do not like reading at all,” he said, “and hated it when I was at Oxford.” Lord John Manners said he could not support the bill, because it would impose an additional tax upon the agricultural interest. Mr. Spooner feared these institutions might be converted into normal schools of agitation. Sir Roundell Palmer—since the Lord Chancellor of England—was most apprehensive that the moment the compulsory principle was introduced, a positive check would be imposed upon the voluntary, self-supporting desire which existed among the people. A division being taken on the bill, there were 118 ayes and 101 noes. The bill passed the House of Commons in July, and the House of Lords, without opposition, in August, 1850.

The Manchester, Liverpool, and Bolton free libraries were immediately organized under this act, the cost of the books being defrayed by public subscription. In 1853 similar legislation was extended to Scotland and Ireland. In July, 1855, the new libraries having gone into operation with the most encouraging results, a new and more liberal library act was passed, by a vote of three to one, which raised the rate of taxation from a halfpenny to a penny in the pound, and allowed the income to be expended for books. Its provisions were made to include towns, boroughs, parishes, and districts having a population of 5000 inhabitants, and permitted two adjoining parishes, having an aggregate population of five thousand, to unite in the establishment of a library.

In 1866 the library act was again improved by removing the limit of population required, and reducing the two-thirds vote on the acceptance of the library tax to a bare majority vote. Provision was also made for cases in which the overseers of parishes refused or neglected to call a meeting of the rate-payers to vote on the question. Any ten rate-payers could secure the calling of such a meeting, and the vote there taken was made binding and legal.

The English free-library system is now so firmly established that it will not be changed except to expand and enlarge it. Its chief supporters are the middle classes, and artisans and laborers, who, with their families, are its most numerous patrons.

The recent extension of suffrage in England has strengthened the system. No candidate for official position who opposed it could hope for success. It has been found that free libraries have not degenerated into political clubs and schools of agitation. No trouble has arisen in the selection of books, and no censorship of the press was required. It was at first supposed that all books relating to religion and politics—the subjects on which people quarrel most—must be excluded. The experiment of including these books was tried in the Manchester and Liverpool libraries, where the books were purchased by private subscription, and no controversy arising therefrom, all apprehension of evil from this cause was allayed. Parliament doubled the rate of taxation, and permitted the purchase of books from the public funds. The adoption of the compulsory system has not imposed a check on the voluntary and self-supporting desire of possessing books which existed among the people. It has strengthened that desire; and ample proof of this statement could be furnished if the prescribed limits of this paper would permit.

It is singular that objections to public libraries have come mainly from men—as we have seen from the debate in the British Parliament—who are educated, and in general matters of public welfare are intelligent above their fellows. These objections, however, were uttered before the persons making them had given the subject any attention, and hence they were disqualified from entertaining an opinion.

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.

It is said that there is much poor fiction, and the statement is true. So there are many poor pictures and poor statues, wretched chromos and more wretched plaster casts. That these productions find purchasers is evidence that there are persons whose ideal standard of excellence is even below these feeble efforts, and they are educated thereby.

But there are novels, we are told, which are immoral and positively debasing. So there are immoral paintings and indecent plastic objects. The act of photography, I am told, is debased to the lowest purposes. Nobody would think of objecting to art because it can be and is degraded. The librarian who should allow an immoral novel in his library for circulation would be as culpable as the manager of a picture gallery who should hang an indecent picture on his walls.

Young people, again, we are told, read too many novels. So they eat too much, play too much, go too often to the lake to bathe, remain too long in the water, and do too much of everything in which they take special delight. The remedy is not to deprive children of these pleasures, but that parents and guardians should regulate them. I have never met a person of much literary culture who would not confess that at some period in his life, usually in his youth, he had read novels excessively. His special interest in them suddenly ceased. He found himself with a confirmed habit of reading, an awakened imagination, a full vocabulary, and a taste for other and higher classes of literature. A novel was read occasionally in later life, as recreation in the midst of professional or technical studies. My observation addressed to this point, and extending over a library experience of thirty years, has confirmed me in the belief that there is in the mental development of every person who later attains to literary culture a limited period when he craves novel-reading, and perhaps reads novels to excess; but from which, if the desire be gratified, he passes safely out into broader fields of study, and this craving never returns to him in its original form.

Again, and finally, we are told that the reading of fiction should be discouraged because it is not true. What department of literature is true? Is it history? Whose history of the United States, for instance, is the true history? Is it Bancroft's? Mr. Bancroft for forty years has been changing the plates of his work to an extent that in pages we can scarcely recognize the original text, and lately he has revised the whole in the new Centennial edition. The accurate student of specialties in American history will talk to you by the hour of mis-statements and errors found in this new issue. Whose history of the reigns of Henry VIII. and of Queen Elizabeth is the true one? Is it Hume's, Turner's, Lingard's, or Froude's? “Do not read to me history,” said a sick monarch, “that I know is a lie. Read to me something that is true.” Is biography true? Which of the score of lives of Mary Queen of Scots is the true biography? Is theology true? Whose is the true body of divinity? Is science true? Why was it necessary to rewrite all the science in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for the ninth edition? Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Othello, do not require to be rewritten every ten or twenty years. The Vicar of Wakefield, Ivanhoe, and Robinson Crusoe have held and will hold their own from generation to generation without revision, because they are ideally true pictures of human life and human nature. Shall we say that in literature and science there is nothing true but fiction and the pure mathematics?

In the public libraries which are growing up in our land, fully four fifths of the money appropriated for books is spent in works adapted to the wants of scholars. In the larger libraries the proportion is even greater. It is hardly becoming for scholars, who enjoy the lion's share, to object to the small proportional expenditure for books adapted to the wants of the masses who bear the burden of taxation.

Mr. Edward Edwards, of the Manchester Library, speaking, in 1859, of novels and romances—which he circulated more freely than is done in any American library—remarked as follows: “It may be truthfully said that at no previous period in the history of English literature has prose fiction been made, in so great a degree as of late years, the vehicle of the best thoughts of some of the best thinkers. Nor, taking it as a whole, was it ever before characterized by so much general purity of tone or loftiness of purpose.”