NJGPA Practice Test 6

Address at the Opening of the Larkspur Free Library, 1904 — by Eliza Hartwell

¹Friends and neighbors of Larkspur Mills: I have been asked to say a few words before we open these doors, and I will try to keep them few, for I know that most of you have come here from a ten-hour shift, and that the books behind me are better company than any speech.

²Twenty years ago there was a library in this town. Some of you will remember it. It occupied two rooms above the bank, and it belonged to the Larkspur Subscribers' Association, which charged five dollars a year for membership. Five dollars was a week's wages for a spinner in those days. The library was open from ten until four, when every spinner was at her frame. It held, I am told, a very fine set of the classics bound in leather, and I am also told that the bindings were in excellent condition when the association dissolved, because they had hardly been opened.

³I do not tell this story to shame the subscribers. They were generous people, and they believed in books. But they believed in books the way one believes in a beautiful garden behind a high wall—as something to be kept, admired and protected rather than walked in. They built a library for the few who already had the leisure to read, and then they wondered why the town did not grow wiser.

⁴The building we open today rests on a different idea: that knowledge is not a luxury, like silk or silver, which a town may enjoy once its necessities are met. Knowledge is itself a necessity, like bread and clean water. A town that hoards it starves; a town that shares it thrives. This library is not a garden behind a wall. It is a granary, and its doors open outward.

⁵Consider what is on these shelves. There are novels, yes, and poems, and the leather classics—for we have bought them back. But there are also manuals of mechanics and chemistry, of bookkeeping and law, of farming and medicine. There is a reading room with the newspapers of four cities. There is a corner for children, with low tables and books they may touch with their own hands. And there are lamps, good lamps, because these doors will stay open until nine o'clock every evening but Sunday, so that the spinner and the carter and the machinist may come when their work is done.

⁶Some have asked why a mill town needs chemistry and law. I will answer with questions of my own. Who most needs to understand the dyes that color our cloth—the owner who buys them, or the dyer who breathes them all day? Who most needs to read a contract—the man who writes it, or the man who must sign it? It is not the comfortable who need knowledge most. It is those who have the least protection without it.

⁷Others have warned me that books will make working people discontented. I do not doubt it. I hope they will. I hope that a boy who reads about the great bridges of Europe will grow discontented with the rickety footbridge over our river and become the engineer who replaces it. I hope that a girl who reads about the circulation of the blood will grow discontented with being told that fevers come from night air, and become the doctor this town has never had. Discontent that has learned to read does not merely complain. It builds.

⁸I have been told, too, that a free library is a charity, and that charity weakens those who receive it. But no one calls a public road a charity, though every one of us walks on it. No one calls a bridge a charity, though the rich man's carriage and the peddler's cart cross it alike. A library is a road. It is the road by which a mind travels from what it knows to what it does not, and like every road, it serves the town best when no toll is collected at the gate.

⁹When these doors open in a moment, I ask only this of you. Do not treat these books the way the subscribers did. Do not keep them clean. Wear them out. Bend their spines, smudge their pages, carry them home in your coat pockets through the rain and bring them back with the corners turned down. A worn book is a book that has done its work, and in ten years, when our librarian tells me that half the collection must be replaced, I shall consider it the finest report this town could give.

¹⁰The doors are open. Go in.