Have you heard of Charles Wesley Smith? Neither have I. He was some obscure librarian in Seattle around the 1900s. He contributed a piece to the Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh General Meeting of the American Library Association titled ”Library Conditions in the Northwest.” The meeting was held in Portland, Oregon on July 4–7, 1905.
He talks, predictably, about libraries in the American Northwest: Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the then territory of Alaska, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The piece starts off rather flowery, with phrases like “To this conference on the Pacific many of its members and most of its officers have come as far westward as Columbus sailed westward from the Pillars of Hercules” and quotations of the poems “Columbus” by Joaquin Miller and “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. He eventually gets into the nitty gritty of numbers, libraries at universities, laws regarding libraries, and so on.
The final section of his piece, “The future,” returns to the puffy language of the introduction. And while he does eventually talk about the future of building libraries in the Northwest, he begins with a paean of libraries as “man’s crowning effort to fulfill that ‘higher law’ of human evolution which bids each individual begin where all his predecessors left off.” I thought it was a pretty powerful statement; the public library is one of our noblest and most important ideas, ever.
Here are all ten paragraphs of that section, courtesy of Google Books:
The future
What prophecy shall I make of the future of the free library as an institution among this people?
To one who knows western America there can be but one answer. The arrival depends only upon the merit of an institution and the hour of its recognition. The hour of its adoption has then struck. No dilatory appeal avails; no sophistical plea of economy will be heeded. Grant me that the free library is man’s crowning effort to fulfill that “higher law” of human evolution which bids each individual begin where all his predecessors left off, and I unhesitatingly prophesy that these great commonwealths, throbbing with the world’s reddest blood, shall quickly appropriate it.
Look around you and you will see on every hand the school and the college already rising. Convince their western builders that the public library is the keystone of the educational system and instantly the world will go forth to hew that stone and put it into place.
In every capital and county seat you will already find a costly structure maintained at large expense that the public may preserve, and have access to, the record of their vested rights in lands and chattels which they call their own. You need but whisper in the builder’s ear, “Here we will erect a structure that shall contain the record of all the rights of man; the secrets he has wrested from Nature in centuries of midnight toil; every vision of beauty that has visited his hungering heart; his aspirations toward the Highest; the hopes that have rescued him from shipwreck and despair”; and such a word shall never be uttered in vain among a generous and enlightened people.
The other day at Buffalo President Eliot said: “The final aim of government by the people for the people is to increase to the highest possible degree, and for the greatest possible number of persons, the pleasurable sensations or cheerful feelings which contribute to make life happy, and to reduce to the lowest terms the preventable evils which go to make life miserable. The reduction of evil is an indirect benefit. The direct way to promote that public happiness, which is the ultimate object of democracy, is to increase the number, variety, and intensity of those sensations and emotions which give innocent and frequently recurring pleasure.”
I believe—pardon my sectional pride—that it is in the western states of our Union that these sentiments, the highest secular expression of mankind’s rights and duties, are to find their quickest appreciation and acceptance. Everyone within the sound of my voice knows that it is in the public library, with its treasures free alike to rich and poor, that society must seek its final defense against sciolism in politics and economics; against blind and unreasoning discontent; against the ennui of the idle; against the malevolence of the vicious; against the despair of the disheartened; against repeating over and again the mistakes whose correction makes up the story of human progress. Here also we find in largest measure “the direct way to promote that public happiness which is the ultimate object of democracy” by increasing “the number, variety, and intensity of those sensations and emotions which give innocent and frequently recurring pleasure.”
Nowhere else, I believe, as in western America—pardon me once more—will you find so pure the gospel of the solidarity of mankind; nor yet anywhere so true homage to the royalty of the individual. Once again here, as in pioneer days otherwhere, the struggle to overcome the forces of nature has knit men together as brothers. The very vastness of the land, its riotous extravagance of beauty, the majesty of its forests, the “splendid inutility” of its mountains, the eternal didactics of its seas, lend a solemnity to life and make men thoughtful of its meaning. Great wealth has not yet come to chill the heart. Governments are relatively pure. The public conscience is comparatively quick. There is a broadness toward that which is not merely marketable.
In all that makes for human progress, then, I say, the West is in duty bound to begin where older lands leave off; and I believe there will be no hesitation. Those Americans whose pillar of fire has been the star of empire hasting in its appointed course have always tried to block out in the wilderness the best type of home and institutions that they last looked upon before they turned their resolute faces westward in search of an ideal.
Therefore, though I have admitted that the free library is not yet numerous in the Northwest, it is safe to say we have a good excuse—they could not have had any library “at home” when we left there, and we don’t know just how to go about it to have one here. The public library will be established just as soon as somebody notices the lack and finds out how to start one. You will not hear of the city council’s refusing the necessary levy; no donation by Mr. Carnegie ever fails of consummation west of the Missouri for lack of compliance with the “usual terms.”
So I pledge the West (ever as hospitable of ideas as of the people who bring them) to the cause of the free library, the cause of “the best reading for the largest number at the least cost.” The Northwest to-day greets the A. L. A., the priesthood of that cause, because we believe that you have come here to help us understand what the public library is, how to make one, and what kind of people is required to make one at its best.
