Page:Address on the opening of the Free Public Library of Ballarat East, on Friday, 1st. January, 1869.djvu/21

 15 will not become painful students, and are we to attempt to make them all philosophers?

There must be hours of relaxation; these must be recruited by what relieves the mind from the stern exactions of business. Prurient tempers may skulk to gloat in private, unobserved, over base and impure thoughts perpetuated by a prostitution of the talents destined one might imagine for a more decent use—but those who come here to read their own books, provided for them by the prudent dispensers of public funds, require no screen to hide their studies from the broad daylight of the public gaze. Are they then to be dragooned into a formal course of compulsory self-improvement? Books free from demoralising or dangerous principles are supplied, let them be used without interference or dictation.

In physical life nature displays a marvellous faculty for assimilation of what is wholesome and nutritive, and for the rejection of what is baneful to the system. There are few well regulated minds in which a similar compensating principle is not to be found. Though it be doubtless true that people cannot be much wiser or better by acquiring a vague superficial smattering of knowledge, we may give our readers credit for common-sense,—we may rest assured that they will not select for study what they cannot understand. What you have collected for them here will do no harm, and, unless their perceptions be woefully blunted and perverted, must do them good. And finally, without descending to recrimination, it might perhaps affirmed that the truly unprofitable, the mawkish, the falsely exaggerated style of writing of modern times is found rather in private reading