library is to supplement the town schools; to
gratify the taste for knowledge which they should have imparted; and to
serve as an instrument for that self-education to which there is no
limit. But tax-payers are not bound to circulate twenty-seven thousand
novels against nineteen hundred volumes of biography and seventeen
hundred of history, according to the figures of one report; or to expend
two-thirds of the working force of their establishment in sending out
"novels and juveniles," according to the statement of another. In a
word, information, not excitement, should be imbibed from the atmosphere
of the town library. That prevailing infirmity of our time which seems
to substitute sensibility for morality should there find small
encouragement. But we shall never know what this institution might do
for a community, so long as the temptation of free novels is thrust in
the faces of all who enter. For it is not to be expected that our youth
fresh from school, moving among the countless agitations of American
life, will select reading that may require some mental exertion, so long
as mental excitement is offered them in unlimited amounts.

I am well aware how much may be said for the story-tellers, and how many
people there are to say it; and, whenever there is danger of their being
unduly neglected, my voice shall be loudly raised in their behalf. But
one may allow the claims of the romances, from Scheherazade to Mrs.
Southworth, and yet maintain that the theory upon which the average town
library is run is faulty. There is no virtue in despising cakes and ale,
and the heat of ginger in the mouth may at times impart a wholesome glow
to the entire system. But it does not quite follow that it is the
function of American towns to supply these stimulants gratis, at the
expense of their tax-payers. While we consider the immense amount of
reading of a certain sort that a town library supplies, it is well to
remember that there are other sorts of reading it may possibly prevent.
For it may encourage reading precisely as prodigality encourages
industry. Luxury and profusion do indeed feed industry, and demoralize
it; but the industry which serves God by blessing man, they prevent from
being fed. I fear that in these days more noble capacities die of a
surfeit from too much poor reading, than starve from want of good books.
The valid defence of institutions working in the interest of State
education is this: they prevent a waste