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philanthropists, perpetually alarmed at the seductions, as they call them, from honest labor presented by public libraries, who condemn the freedom of admission, the honorable confidence reposed in readers, and lament the inducements to waste time in the perusal of unprofitable, trashy books.
We might meet the first objection by the sober enquiry if it be true?—if it be the fact that men, who can readily earn from six to sixteen shillings a-day, are indeed such bibliomaniacs,—and whether they do throw up or avoid engagements from which they derive support for themselves and their wives and families (if they have any) to become such ill-timed students?
Now, if there ever were a country in which this objection is inapplicable, it is in this. The hours of labor reduced to eight, leave to artisans, tradesmen, and other dwellers in towns a very large portion of the remainder of the twenty-four virtually unoccupied. The high rate of remuneration for every kind of labor places within the reach of all, means to indulge in the sensual excesses so destructive to health, strength, and reputation, temptations to which are so numerous on all sides.
How is this leisure to be disposed of? In the public-house? the singing-hall? the dancing-saloon? which hold out seductions somewhat more dangerous, methinks, to honest labor than those presented by a library; or in listless inaction, in weary unoccupied solitude? That cannot be. While man is a social animal society he must have, and better a thousand times that he should he should seek relief from the tedium of unemployed hours in the improving conversation of