Library Work with Children

								

right solution of this question, by making no restriction
whatever as to age. This course recommends itself as the wisest
and the most consistent with the idea of the public library on
many grounds.
In the first place, age is no criterion of mental condition and
capacity. So varying is the date of the awakening of intellectual
life, and the rapidity of its progress, that height of stature
might almost as well be taken for its measure as length of years.
In every community there are some young minds of peculiar gifts
and precocious development, as fit to cope with the masterpieces
of literature at ten years of age, as the average person of
twenty, and more appreciative of them. From this class come the
minds which rule the world of mind, and confer the greatest
benefits on the race. How can the public library do more for the
intellectual culture of the whole community than by setting
forward in their careers those who will be the teachers and
leaders of their generation? In how many of the lives of those
who have been eminent in literature and science do we find a
youth almost discouraged because deprived of the means of
intellectual growth. The lack of appreciation of youthful demands
for culture is one of the saddest chapters in the history of the
world's comprehending not the light which comes into it. Our
public libraries will fail in an important part of their mission
if they shut out from their treasures minds craving the best, and
for the best purposes, because, forsooth, the child is too young
to read good books.
Some will be found to advocate the exclusion of such searchers
for knowledge on the ground that precocious tastes should be
repressed in the interests of physical health. But a careful
investigation of the facts in such cases can hardly fail to
convince one that in them repression is the last thing that will
bring about bodily health and vigor. There should doubtless be
regulation, but nothing will be so likely to conduce to the
health and physical well being of a person with strong mental
cravings as the reasonable satisfaction of those cravings. Cases
can be cited where children, having what seemed to be a premature
development of mental qualities coupled with weak or even
diseased bodily constitutions, have rapidly improved in health
when circumstances have allowed the free exercise of their
intellectual powers, and have finally attained a maturity
vigorous alike in body and mind. This is in the nature of a
digression, but it can do no harm to call attention thus to the
facts which contradict the common notion that intellectual
precocity should be discouraged. Nature is the best guide, and it
is in accordance with all her workings, that when she has in hand
the production of a giant of intellect, the young Hercules should
astonish observers by feats of strength even in his cradle. Let
not the public library, then, be found working against nature by
establishing, as far as its influence goes, a dead level of