Thus our Free Library will amuse, and instruct, and inspire. Over its entrance I seem to read as on the front of the oldest in the world, the inscription, "The healing of the soul," or the words of FRANKLIN to his namesake town, "I give you books instead of a bell, sense rather than sound." Let it have free course for a generation, calling to culture as ceaselessly as a standing army calls to war, and this community will say with SENECA, "Leisure without books and letters is mental death and burial."
The first public library in Ohio--just two years younger than the State--was founded in Ames. It was bought by hunters who threw together a lot of raccoon skins, sent them in a sleigh by one of their number to Boston and there bartered them for books. They soon hunted Greek as zealously as game, and while Ames remained a hamlet ten of them, or their children, were among the early graduates of the State University.
The influences of a library are _cumulative_, and sometimes become manifest only after a long lapse of ages. The cuniform library of Assyrian bricks, dating from pre-historic periods, burned up, buried and forgotten just now emerges from its grave speaking in a voice heard round the world, and no less authoritative than a second book of Genesis. From its shelves more centuries look down upon us than upon NAPOLEON at the Pyramids.
Libraries are hemmed in by no lines of State, nation, race, language, religion or century. Their field is the world. But ours is the cosmopolitan age, and we are pre-eminently the cosmopolitan people. More than any other people, then must we feel the need of libraries, which are, of all institutions, the most cosmopolitan. Hence they will benefit us most.
Considerations like these demonstrate that free libraries tend to _equality_ and _fraternity_. They are free lunches, crying to all: "Cut, and come again!" As we all have equal rights at the polls and in court, so have we in the free library. In church we each secure a blessing in proportion to our capacity; so can we in the library. In both blessed are they who hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled. In public schools all can enjoy the best of teaching without money and without price; so can they in the free library. Free libraries will create an aristocracy--one open to talent and toil, but to nothing else; the aristocracy of knowledge. Where street cars have been introduced, half the private carriages are soon given up, so the establishment of free libraries will lead many to refrain from large domestic collections as superfluous, and to the transfer of many a private library to the public shelves, where they will not only do more good, but will be better cared for, better arranged, and more accessible than they now are even to their owners. One millionaire as we walked into his library, said with a sigh: "See how many gaps there are in my shelves! Five hundred of my books are missing, lent and lost." "Lost!" cried I, half in joke, "say rather found! lost to you, but found each by some one who will make the most of them. Would to heaven these 5,000 were lost in the same way, lost by you who have no time nor care for them, found by those who have both. Nobody could steal them from you, but at most only from moths and worms, dust and mould." Rich men who have bought libraries as luxuries will learn that the way to save them is to lose them, and that their books serve them best when deposited in free libraries.