198 THE LIBRARY 



of humanity's achievements, the history of mankind's trials and 

 sorrows and sufferings, of its victories and defeats, and of its gradual 

 progress upwards in spite of frequent fluctuation and failure. In 

 this chronicle of the past lie lessons for the present and the future; 

 from the lives of storied heroes comes the inspiration that leads the 

 race onward and upward. A university without a library would of 

 necessity have a very small and weak faculty only the few pro- 

 fessors who could be induced to go where the most important in- 

 strumentality of their work was lacking; the university that has an 

 adequate library includes in its faculty the professors of all other 

 universities and all the great teachers of all countries and ages. 



" But is it worth while to consider a university without a library? 

 Can there be such an institution? 



" In higher education, then, the library is a necessity. In element- 

 ary and secondary education it is no less essential, if the most is 

 to be made of the few years that the average child spends in school 

 and if he is to be started on a path of self-culture. On this point 

 Stanley Jevons says: ' In omitting that small expenditure in a 

 universal system of libraries which w r ould enable young men and 

 women to keep up the three R's and continue their education, we 

 spend 97 and stingily decline the 3 really needed to make the 

 rest of the 100 effective.' 



" At the International Library Conference in London, in 1897, 

 one of the most distinguished American librarians, who has been an 

 administrator in a large educational field outside of the library, ex- 

 pressed his view of the supreme importance of the library in a scheme 

 of popular education by saying that if he had to choose between the 

 public school and the public library if he could have only one 

 (though the alternative is one that never will nor can be presented), 

 he would keep the library and let the school go. For, he argued, 

 every child would learn to read somehow, and, with a free library 

 that actively sought him, he would be better off than if he had a 

 school to teach him to read, but no books to read after he had learned. 

 But however divergent might be opinions regarding this impossible 

 alternative, there is no doubt that the public library, with enlarged 

 functions and activities, has at least equal potentialities with the 

 school. Whether the formal instruction of the school or the broader 

 education of the library is of greater value, depends on what is the 

 chief aim. If it is merely to make breadwinners, the school may be 

 the more useful, though in this, too, the library is an efficient coadju- 

 tor; but if our purpose is to make men and women, citizens of a 

 progressive nation, active members of an aspiring society, the library 

 may fairly claim at least equal rank with the school. For the school 

 wields its direct influence over the average child but a few years ; the 

 library is an active influence through life. 



