Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/220

 2^8 The Library. at Oxford and elsewhere, we have had Carlyle regularly trotted out, and his somewhat hasty description of a library as a " People's University " much enlarged upon, but I cannot help thinking that we are guilty of something like humbug, when we tell the horny-handed that they are enjoying a university, when they have only a library; or when we tell them that the useful but somewhat dreary looking building in the east end is a "palace." The thoughtful working man who has been through Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, and who knows that one swallow does not make a summer, nor one princess* make a palace, gently veils one of his eyes when he is told that Mr. Besant's dream in the Mile End Road is a palace ; and an intelligent artisan who has enjoyed University Extension Lec- tures and been present at a Summer School in Oxford will not deny a mild scepticism when he hears of the "University" of Clerkenwell over which Principal James Duff Brown so ably presides. I am a firm believer in the gospel of the cobbler sticking to his last, and I believe that a library which is a library pure and simple, is for its purpose a more efficient machine than a hybrid institution where, at one hour of the day, the principal is wrestling with the organisation of technical classes, and at another, trying to order aright his catalogue and other true library work. But no good University exists that has not a library, and so / should like to see the public libraries aim at becoming, not "people's universities" in themselves, but essential and invaluable parts of a university. A hundred years hence, when our descendants shall spend the sums they now lavish on battleships and Tommy Atkins, upon the intellectual development of the race, no doubt fully equipped people's universities will spring up all over the land, but although we may not hope to enter into such an inher- itance, we might at least do something to realise it in a tentative way, if we could draw together into a harmonious working scheme the various educational agencies of the day. At Nottingham it has so fallen out that the local college and the public library are under one authority and they have wisely brought them together, so that under one roof is to be found a true people's university, save in the matter of degree granting, fully equipped in every branch of education likely to be of use to the good folks of that enterprising town.
 * Since this paper was read even the " one princess " has abdicated. ED.