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When I was a boy I should have jumped with joy if I could have found
a corner in a reading-room for an hour or two a day, or have been
enabled to take books home as boys and girls can do now where public
libraries exist. A majority of people cannot say, with Prospero in
the Tempest "My library was dukedom large enough." They
might, however, and ought to, be able to participate in the advantages
of a library created and maintained by public action. |
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As I did
a little in the Press in co-operation with William Ewart, the
author and chief promoter of the Free Libraries Act in Parliament,
it was only fit and proper, forty or fifty years afterwards,
when I had means and the disposition, that I should encourage
the public library movement. It is regrettable, after so many
years and so much general prosperity, that so little, comparatively,
has been done to provide such libraries; and what has been done
has, in very many cases, been accomplished in the face of organised
opposition-an opposition largely inspired and assisted by the
public-house. |
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is different in the United States. Mr. Choate, their deservedly popular
Ambassador in this country, in his address on education at Oxford
in August, 1903, said "At the beginning of the last century there
were only twenty-six colleges and universities in the whole of the
territory of the United States, and many of these were in an infant
and undeveloped state. They are now numbered literally by hundreds,
bringing the higher education home to the people everywhere."
He also said: "In Massachusetts not even a Carnegie Library is
to be found. In that State, which consists of three hundred and fifty
townships, all but five have established, each for itself, a free
library, open to the use of all citizens, and maintained at the public
expense." There are, in fact, almost as many public libraries
in a single State in America as we have altogether, after fifty years
of effort, in this country! Mr. Whitelaw Reid, the successor of Mr.
Choate, in a speech a few days after his arrival in this country,
said: "The city and State of New York spend on free education
from taxation funds five times more than was spent in the whole administration
of justice." This being so, it is not surprising that the United
States should be leaving us behind in the intellectual and industrial
race. Public libraries are, in my opinion, entitled to public support
because they are educative, recreative, and useful; because they bring
the products of research and imagination, and the stored wisdom of
ages and nations, within the easy reach of the poorest citizens ;
because they distribute without curtailing the intellectual wealth
of the world; because they encourage seekers after technical knowledge,
and thereby promote industrial improvement; because, being under the
public eye, they are economically conducted ; because they teach equality
of citizenship, and are essentially democratic in spirit and action,
in as much as they are maintained out of the public rates and subject
to public control. All may not use them, but all may do so if they
like; and as they are means of instructing and improving some, all
are directly or indirectly benefited by them. Nothing, therefore,
has given me more satisfaction than to have been able to provide public
library buildings at Whitechapel, Shoreditch, Hoxton, Edmonton, Walworth,
Hammersmith, East Dulwich, St. George's-in-the-East, Acton, Poplar,
Limehouse, Nunhead, East Ham, Plaistow, North Camberwell, Newton Abbot,
Truro, 11 Falmouth, Camborne,
Redruth, St. Ives, Bodmin, Liskeard, and Launceston. |
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