The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses. Various
Читать онлайн книгу.
was accordingly done, and for some time contented us. Finding the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from the books more common by commencing a public subscription library. I drew a sketch of the plan and rules that would be necessary, and got a skilful conveyancer to put the whole in form of articles of agreement to be subscribed; by which each subscriber engaged to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of the books and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each and ten shillings per annum. With this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed, and more intelligent, than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.”
I think you will agree with me that this is a very striking bit of testimony, too much so to permit us to hurry past it. Note these few things about it.
In the first place, that device of Franklin's, started in 1731—what does it really signify in our history? It signifies this. It signifies a new departure for mankind—the application of the democratic spirit to the distribution of intellectual advantages. These things called books—these bewitched and bewitching fabrics of paper and ink, which somehow contain the accumulated thought of all nations and of all centuries, and can communicate to us the noblest pleasures and the most godlike powers—these potent things, in all the ages before, had been accessible only to some few fortunate human beings—to a privileged class—to rich men who wished them—to scholars who could win their way to them—in short, to an aristocracy of intellectual privileges. But in 1731, by that modest device of Benjamin Franklin, the democratic spirit—the modern humane spirit—the spirit which in its true nature is a levelling spirit only in this grand sense that it levels upward and not downward, and raises the general average of human intelligence and felicity—this benign and mighty democratic spirit, I say, which was then marching with gentle but invincible footsteps along all avenues and pathways of modern life, and was laying its miraculous touch on church and state, on kings and priests and peasants, on the laws and law-makers and law-breakers, on all the old activities of society, on the old adjustments of human relations, that spirit then began to touch this relation also, the relation of man to the superb and royal realm of books. And the first effect of that touch was what? It was enlargement, liberalization, extension of intellectual opportunity for man simply as man. Hitherto books had been the privilege of the privileged class. In effect, Franklin says: They shall be so no more. In this year 1731 I set agoing a device concerning books which shall abolish the privileged class by making all classes privileged, and shall finally result in placing the blessings of books within the reach of all.
But, in the second place, in that year 1731, who was Franklin who did all that, and who were the persons who helped to do it? He and they were young men; obscure men, poor men, laboring men; mechanics and tradesmen of the town where they lived; young men just getting a start in the world. So this new era in the brain life of the American people had its beginning with such as they were. Who of us, therefore, however modest be our lot in life, has any right to say to himself, “I am not in position to do anything for the advancement of my race”? Nay; my brother, think of young Ben Franklin, the printer, and his 50 brother mechanics; remember what they accomplished; and do not despair of being useful in your time also. And in the third place, this movement came from those young men associated together in a social debating club. It was their experience in the actual discussion of the problems of human thought which made them feel the need of books and suggested this great measure for popularizing books: a fact which fits in well with Mr. Sage's idea of blending the two things together here; of giving perpetual house-room and hospitality to a debating club, here, in the very midst of this library. And now the fourth point is, that the plan started by Franklin and those other young mechanics in Philadelphia, in 1731, the plan of joint-stock library associations, worked so well there that, as Franklin tells, it was taken up in other provinces. Naturally, the new plan was adopted first in the towns where it was heard of first—the towns nearest to Philadelphia. But before many years, the news of it had travelled far, to the southward and the northward, and whether consciously or unconsciously the model set up in Philadelphia, was imitated, with more or less closeness, in scores of places far away. One curious example springs up in South Carolina. It is in the Georgetown district, then given to the growth of indigo. A number of the planters came together and formed the Winyaw Indigo Society. Their chief business was to have a pleasant time together and talk indigo; they paid their initiation fees in indigo; they paid their annual dues in indigo; and presently they found their treasury so full and overflowing with indigo, that they resolved to devote their surplus in part to the formation of the Indigo Society Library. Then, too, at about the same time in Charleston, seventeen young men, of very limited means, desirous of seeing the best and freshest English magazines, formed a club for that purpose, and started with a fund of ten pounds sterling, not venturing at first to hope to be able to purchase books also. Soon, however, their plan grew and took in books; and from this small beginning arose the great “Library Society” of Charleston, which has ministered to the pleasure and benefit of the people of that place for nearly a century and a half.
But the Philadelphia plan travelled northward as well as southward. In 1747, at Newport, Rhode Island, was formed, also out of a discussion club, the famous Redwood Library, which lives and flourishes still. In 1753 the Providence Library was started on the same general plan; in 1754, the New York Society Library; in 1760, the Social Library at Salem, Massachusetts; in 1763, similar libraries at Lancaster and at Portland, Maine; in 1753, a similar one at Hingham; and so on throughout the country.
One of the most curious of these joint-stock library associations was one formed in 1751 in three parishes in the towns of York and Kittery, Maine, and called the “Revolving Library.” It was not a circulating library—that being the name of a library from which the books circulate singly and in units; but it was called a “revolving library” because the entire library was to revolve, in bulk, on its own axes, in an orbit including the parsonages of the three parishes embraced in the scheme. And thus this library began to revolve from parsonage to parsonage more than 130 years ago; and it has been revolving ever since, occasionally encountering some queer experiences, as when, about 15 years ago, it was found by the new pastor of Kittery Point in the garret of the parsonage, “dumped down on the attic floor like a load of coal,” the wife of the former incumbent having had a prejudice against books for sanitary reasons, “considering them unhealthy, and so being unwilling to have them in any living room” where their presence might communicate diseases to the family.
This, of course, is a rather eccentric specimen of the class of libraries now under view. A very good normal example of the class is furnished us by the social library of Castine, Maine, organized in 1801; and its articles of association I desire to read to you as exhibiting the scope and spirit of this whole movement for supplying the public with books through jointstock companies. The articles of association are as follows: “It is proposed by the persons whose names are here subjoined to establish a social library in this town. It is greatly to be lamented that excellent abilities are not unfrequently doomed to obscurity by reason of poverty; that the rich purchase almost everything but books; and that reading has become so unfashionable an amusement in what we are pleased to call this enlightened age and country. To remedy these evils; to excite a fondness for books; to afford the most rational and profitable amusement; to prevent idleness and immorality; and to promote the diffusion of useful knowledge, piety, and virtue, at an expense which small pecuniary abilities can afford, we are induced to associate for the above purposes; and each agrees to pay for the number of shares owned, and annexed to his name at $5 per share.”
The first public library in the north-west was established by an association formed at Marietta, Ohio,