of our time have been brought about—vast railroads, vast manufacturing and commercial enterprises. And so men and women, who could not singly get the books they wanted, have joined forces and have got them by combination.
It is a notable fact, however, that this third stage of library evolution was not reached until more than a hundred years after the first colonies had been settled.
Many of you, doubtless, in wandering about Philadelphia—perhaps during our great centennial visit to that city—may have noticed the venerable building of the Philadelphia Library company, and in the walls of it an old tablet with this inscription: “Be it remembered in honor of the Philadelphia youth (then chiefly artificers) that, in 1731, they cheerfully, at the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, one of their number, instituted the Philadelphia Library, which though small at first, is become highly valuable and extensively useful, and which the walls of this building are now destined to contain and preserve.” Now, in reality, that year 1731, when that first subscription library was started in America, begins a new epoch in the intellectual life of the American people, the epoch of systematic cooperation for the procurement by the people of the great intellectual and spiritual boon of books. Immense results have followed from that example set in 1731. Therefore, let us stop a moment longer, and listen to Benjamin Franklin's own account of the way in which he came to think of that capital project. “At the time I established myself in Pennsylvania, there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the alehouse, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I proposed that we should all of us bring our books to that room; where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at liberty to borrow such as he wished to read at home. This was accordingly done, and for some time contented us. Finding the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from the books more common by commencing a public subscription library. I drew a sketch of the plan and rules that would be necessary, and got a skilful conveyancer to put the whole in form of articles of agreement to be subscribed; by which each subscriber engaged to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of the books and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each and ten shillings per annum. With this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed, and more intelligent, than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.”
I think you will agree with me that this is a very striking bit of testimony, too much so to permit us to hurry past it. Note these few things about it.
In the first place, that device of Franklin's, started in 1731—what does it really signify in our history? It signifies this. It signifies a new departure for mankind—the application of the democratic spirit to the distribution of intellectual advantages. These things called books—these bewitched and bewitching fabrics of paper and ink, which somehow contain the accumulated thought of all nations and of all centuries, and can communicate to us the noblest pleasures and the most godlike powers—these potent things, in all the ages before, had been accessible only to some few fortunate human beings—to a privileged class—to rich men who wished them—to scholars who could win their way to them—in short, to an aristocracy of intellectual privileges. But in 1731, by that modest device of Benjamin Franklin, the democratic spirit—the modern humane spirit—the spirit which in its true nature is a levelling spirit only in this grand sense that it levels upward and not downward, and raises the general average of human intelligence and felicity—this benign and mighty democratic spirit, I say, which was then marching with gentle but invincible footsteps along all avenues and pathways of modern life, and was laying its miraculous touch on church and state, on kings and priests and peasants, on the laws and law-makers and law-breakers, on all the old activities of society, on the old adjustments of human relations, that spirit then began to touch this relation also, the relation of man to the superb and royal realm of books. And the first effect of that touch was what? It was enlargement, liberalization, extension of intellectual opportunity for man simply as man. Hitherto books had been the privilege of the privileged class. In effect, Franklin says: They shall be so no more. In this year 1731 I set agoing a device concerning books which shall abolish the privileged class by making all classes privileged, and shall finally result in placing the blessings of books within the reach of all.
But, in the second place, in that year 1731, who was Franklin who did all that, and who were the persons who helped to do it? He and they were young men; obscure men, poor men, laboring men; mechanics and tradesmen of the town where they lived; young men just getting a start in the world. So this new era in the brain life of the American people had its beginning with such as they were. Who of us, therefore, however modest be our lot in life, has any right to say to himself, “I am not in position to do anything for the advancement of my race”? Nay; my brother, think of young Ben Franklin, the printer, and his 50 brother mechanics; remember what they accomplished; and do not despair of being useful in your time also. And in the third place, this movement came from those young men associated together in a social debating club. It was their experience in the actual discussion of the problems of human thought which made them feel the need of books and suggested this great measure for popularizing books: a fact which fits in well with Mr. Sage's idea of blending the two things together here; of giving perpetual house-room and hospitality to a debating club, here, in the very midst of this library. And now the fourth point is, that the plan started by Franklin and those other young mechanics in Philadelphia, in 1731, the plan of joint-stock library associations, worked so well there that, as Franklin tells, it was taken up in other provinces. Naturally, the new plan was adopted first in the towns where it was heard of first—the towns nearest to Philadelphia. But before many years, the news of it had travelled far, to the southward and the northward, and whether consciously or unconsciously the model set up in Philadelphia, was imitated, with more or less closeness, in scores of places far away. One curious example springs up in South Carolina. It is in the Georgetown district, then given to the growth of indigo. A number of the planters came together and formed the Winyaw Indigo Society. Their chief business was to have a pleasant time together and talk indigo; they paid their initiation fees in indigo; they paid their annual dues in indigo; and presently they found their treasury so full and overflowing with indigo, that they resolved to devote their surplus in part to the formation of the Indigo Society Library. Then, too, at about the same time in Charleston, seventeen young men, of very limited means, desirous of seeing the best and freshest English magazines, formed a club for that purpose, and started with a fund of ten pounds sterling, not venturing at first to hope to be able to purchase books also. Soon, however, their plan grew and took in books; and from this small beginning arose the great “Library Society” of Charleston, which has ministered to the pleasure and benefit of the people of that place for nearly a century and a half.
But the Philadelphia plan travelled northward as well as southward. In 1747, at Newport, Rhode Island, was formed, also out of a discussion club, the famous Redwood Library, which lives and flourishes still. In 1753 the Providence Library was started on the same general plan; in 1754, the New York Society Library; in 1760, the Social Library at Salem, Massachusetts; in 1763, similar libraries at Lancaster and at Portland, Maine; in 1753, a similar one at Hingham; and so on throughout the country.
One of the most curious of these joint-stock library associations was one formed in 1751 in three parishes in the towns of York and Kittery, Maine,
