Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/25

 it has been written to beguile us from our daily routine of life, and to give us a little change of thought or mood. It may please us, or it may make us sad—it may even anger us by upsetting our pet theories and contradicting us on our own lines of argument; but if it has taken us away for a time from ourselves, it has fulfilled the greater part of its mission, and done us a good turn. Those who have really learned to read, are no encouragers of the Free Library craze. The true lover of books will never want to peruse volumes that are thumbed and soiled by hundreds of other hands—he or she will manage to buy them and keep them as friends in the private household. Any book, save the most expensive "édition de luxe," can be purchased for a few shillings,—a little saving on drugged beer and betting would enable the most ordinary mechanic to stock himself with a very decent library of his own. To borrow one's mental fare from Free Libraries is a dirty habit to begin with. It is rather like picking up eatables dropped by some one else in the road, and making one's dinner off another's leavings. One book, clean and fresh from the bookseller's counter, is worth half a dozen of the soiled and messy knock-about volumes, which many of our medical men assure us carry disease-germs in their too-frequently fingered pages. Free Libraries are undoubtedly very useful resorts for betting men. They can run in, glance at the newspapers for the latest "Sporting Items" and run out again. But why ratepayers should support such houses of call for these gentry remains a mystery which one would have to pierce through all the Wool and Wobble of Municipal Corporations