wITAT WE OWE TO LIBRARIES
[The following letter has been sent by Mr. Strachey to Mr. Walter A. Briscoe, the Chairman of the Library Association Publicity Committee, Public Library, Nottingham.] 15th June, 1925.
I should be an ungrateful man if I did not do everything
I could to help the work of the Library Association. I am one of the people who owe almost everything in life, on the
intellectual side, to libraries. I was born and brought up in a house with a big library, and every house in which I have lived since has by good fortune contained a library, my own or somebody else's. I am writing this among some
thirty or forty thousand books. . . .
Personal experience then makes me always in favour of libraries. There men gain the two best things in life, intellec- tual force and intellectual freedom.
But, of course, there are bad libraries and good libraries, and from this naturally flows the precept that the better the type of library, the better the type of reading ; and the better the type of reading, the better the type of nation. Indeed, primary education might be described as fitting men to make use of a library. In learning how to read and write and cipher men are in effect learning how to use the mental tools of existence. Those tools are books, and books make a library. The wise State, therefore, sees to it that there is plentiful supply of tools at hand, so that anyone who wants to use them for his own and the public good can do so without impediment.
To educate people, and then not provide them with tools to work with is obviously an absurdity—if not, indeed,
Previous page
