DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES 279 



torical, theological, law, medical, scientific, oriental, and 

 society. The century came in with five or six of these, and 

 closed with as many hundred. 



The private libraries were intended for the owner and his 

 friends; the collef2;e libraries for the professors and their stu- 

 dents; the proprietary libraries for the stockholders and their 

 families; the mercantile, at least primarily, for the merchants 

 and their clerks; the other libraries for limited classes. So far 

 there were none for all the people, and none free. But in the 

 northern states all the people were beginning to want reading, 

 and were rapidly becoming willing to tax themselves for it. 

 With the second third of the century began a new era, which 

 the Uttle town of Peterboro, in New Hampshire, had the honor 

 of inaugurating. At the instance of the Unitarian minister, a 

 free Ubrary was founded in 1833 by an appropriation that has 

 l)een continued annually to this day. Thus America became 

 the birthplace of the free hbrary, for the leaders of the move- 

 ment, which resulted in the library law of 1850 in England, 

 have said that they derived the idea from this country. But 

 the town was in advance of its time. Thirteen years passed 

 before another little town — Orange, in Massachusetts — ven- 

 tured on the same step; four years later Wayland followed. 

 Neither of these had any right to spend their money so, but 

 their lawlessness was not rebuked, and perhaps contributed to 

 the passage of the acts by which New Hampshire in 1849 and 

 Massachusetts in 1851 authorized any town to tax itself for a 

 free pul^lic library. 



A Bostonian has expressed his surprise that Boston, a 

 city with traditions of intelligence and education, gave no 

 indications of considering this matter of free libraries till it 

 was over two hundred years old. He might have added that 

 she spent a long time in considering; there were eleven years 

 between the first suggestion and the decisive action in 1852; 

 but when she finally adopted the idea there was no hesitation 

 in carrying it out thoroughly. She has ended by collecting the 

 largest stock, erecting the costliest building, and for the first 

 forty years having the largest circulation of any city in 

 America. 



Nor is this all. The library was in the hands of men who 



