(7) Similar comparisons with the six smaller cities listed would give results generally similar, but showing a still more liberal rate per head and dollar of expenditure for libraries.
In addition to this exposition of comparative parsimony a feature of it should be remembered which might easily escape notice: that, while the money for running expenses is all gone at the end of the year, nearly all of the allowance above running expenses remains represented by valuable property. Thus, if the year's allowance for this library had been $28,000, instead of $18,000, it would not have cost a cent more to run the library and at the year's end about $10,000 worth of books would remain added to the permanent property of the city.
Another result of this policy is to prevent printing any catalogue of the recent additions to the library; so that there is practically no access, and there will, for the present, continue to be none, even for the public who own the books, to all additions to this library since June, 1884, being several thousand titles. It is needless to point out that if there were to be the hypothesis of an unfriendly purpose entertained against the library, that purpose would be served as directly by suppressing the names of books in the library as by preventing the addition of new ones, or by the replacing of those worn out.
These brief statements sufficiently show what our city is doing, and what other cities are doing, for or against public libraries. It is not within the scope of this paper to inquire after the real reason for the stop put to the progress of the San Francisco Free Public Library. One hypothesis is, that, instead of any unfriendly intention against the library itself, the step was taken to help in persuading the public that the "dollar limit" to the rate of city taxation is too low, and that our citizens must submit to a higher rate. As the money saved is only $6,000, the economy is not great in itself, being about one four-hundredth part of the city tax levy. If the proposed effect was expected to be produced by continuously annoying and dissatisfying the citizens there is more reason in the scheme; for the library is frequented by more than a thousand persons daily; between 26,000 and 27,000 cards have been issued to authorize the home use of books; and there are always at any given moment from 5,900 to 6,000 volumes from the library in use in as many homes all over the city. To inconvenience and disoblige so large a constituency as this may naturally produce some effect. This paper need not attempt to decide whether that effect would naturally be approval or disapproval of the treatment of the library, enthusiasm in favor of, or against, the proposed increase of taxation, unpopularity or popularity of the institution itself, or of those whose action so effectually cripples its usefulness. Nor will it discuss the still larger question of the "dollar limit" itself,[4] however decisively important all these inquiries are for the future of the library, and however interesting and clear the arguments and conclusions on those subjects may be. But what it may properly do is, to state, without any pretence of novelty, but simply in order to refresh the public memory, the chief heads of a doctrine of her public libraries from a practical point of view.