Part 2 (1/2)
OREGON LIBRARY COMMISSION.
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
We all believe in public libraries. We frequently discuss the library we are to get ”bye and bye.” We do not find that it is helping the boys and girls who are growing up in our town now. Will the next generation need it more than this? Will the children of the next generation be dearer to us than the boys and girls that now cheer our firesides? Will they use a library better because their parents have not had such privileges?
We all want a library, for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the good name of our village. Why not get it now and be getting the good out of it?
It is only a question of method.
The library when built should benefit all the people, and therefore it should be built by all the people. Give us all a chance to help, and then the library will belong to all of us.
WISCONSIN FREE LIBRARY COMMISSION.
LIBRARIES AND HAPPINESS
The great purpose of a public library is to promote and unite intelligence. It brings together the products of the wise minds of the world. It holds within its walls a collection of all the wise and witty things ever said: these it marks and indexes and offers to its friends.
It is in its community a sort of intellectual minuteman, always ready to supply to every comer something of interest and pleasure. It puts good books, and no others, into the hands of children. It tells about Cinderella and informs you on riots in Moscow. It offers you a novel of modern j.a.pan and a history of Venice of the past. It knows about the milk in the cocoanut, the floods of the river Nile, the advantages of education, the evils of legislation, how to plan a home, why bread won't rise, and can tell more about the mental failings that give Jamaica and Venezuela trouble than most of our congressmen ever dreamed of.
Reading is the short cut into the heart of life. If you are talking with a group of friends about, for example, different parts of the United States, and some one happens to mention a city or town in which you have lived, note how your interest quickens, and how eager you are to hear news of the place or to tell of your experience in it. This is a simple every-day fact. The same thing you have observed a thousand times about any subject or talk with which you may be familiar. We learn about many things just by keeping alive and moving round! Those things we have learned about we can't help being interested in. That is the way we are made. If we knew about more things our interests would be greater in number, keener, more satisfying; we would talk more, ask more questions, be more alert, get more pleasure.
The lesson from this is plain enough: if you wish to have a good time, learn something. You like to meet old friends. Your brain, also, likes to come across things it knows already, to renew acquaintance with the knowledge it has stored away and half forgotten. The pleasures of recognition and a.s.sociation; the delights of renewing your friends.h.i.+ps with your own ideas are many, easy to get, never failing. But if you wish to have interests and delights in good plenty you must know of many things. If you wish to be happy, learn something.
This sounds like advice to a student. It is not, it is a suggestion to the wayfarer. For this learning process may be as delightful as it is to gather flowers by the roadside in a summer walk.
J. C. DANA.
LIBRARY WORTH SELF-DENIAL
An inexhaustible mine of pleasure is open for the boy or girl who loves good books and has access to them. Without effort on the part of the parent they are kept off the street and from the company of the idle and vicious and are storing their minds with useful knowledge, or are being taught high ideals and n.o.ble purposes. Thus they develop into men and women who are an honor to their parents and worthy citizens of our great republic.
Such is the product of a Free Public Library. Is it not worth the small pittance it will cost? Many a laboring man spends more money in a week for tobacco than the maintenance of a library would cost him in a year.
Is not the education and the development of our bright boys and girls worth a little self-denial?
We all desire that our children shall have better opportunities than we have had, and not have to work as we have worked. Here is an opportunity to help them help themselves, which is the very best help that can be given any one. Let's be ”boosters” and help ourselves, help our town, and help our boys and girls by unitedly supporting the library proposition.
IOWA LIBRARY COMMISSION.
REASONS FOR HAVING A FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
Public libraries have without delay become an essential part of a public education system and are as clearly useful as the public schools. They are not only cla.s.sed with schools, but have generally become influential adjuncts of the public schools. The number of readers is rapidly increasing and the character of the books is constantly improving.
Not infrequently the objection is heard that the public libraries are opening the doors to light and useless books; that reading can be, and often is, carried to a vicious and enervating excess, and therefore that the libraries' influence is doubtful and on the whole not good. This argument does not need elaborate exposure.
The main purpose of the library is to counteract and check the circulation and influence of the empty and not infrequently vicious books that are so rife. A visit to any news-stand will disclose a world of low and demoralizing ”penny dreadfuls” and other trash. These are bought by boys and girls because they want to read and can nowhere else obtain reading material. This deluge of worthless periodicals and books can be counteracted only by gratuitous supplies from the public library.
Whether these counteracting books be fiction or not, they may be pure and harmless, and often of intellectual merit and moral excellence. The question is not whether people shall read fiction--for read it they will--but whether they are to have good fiction instead of worthless and harmful trash.