marcations which had been but too rare in their past history, and is of good omen for the future. In four of these towns taken together, (as I may venture here to repeat), upwards of 140,000 volumes have been collected within five years, but of these only about 30,000 have been obtained by gift, and in each town of the four, the presented books-taking them on the whole (there are, of course, some striking exceptions)-form by far the least valuable part of the Library. In most of the excepted instances, also,-where the books given have been remarkable for their intrinsic value, rarity, or beauty of condition, they have been purchased expressly for presentation, so that in substance the donation has rather been of money than of books. In the case of Manchester-one of the four towns here alluded to a systematic effort was made to obtain by donation the books and documents which have been issued by the various learned societies and public bodies of the kingdom, and, more particularly, of such as have been printed at the national expense. The success, however, even as respects the last-named class of publications, has been very partial. By the Registrar General, the Board of Trade, the Poor Law Board, and the Colonial Office, the various reports and other papers of those departments respectively were very liberally granted. The Court of Directors of the East India Company also acceded to the application, which in this case derived no weight from any public burden in connection with the production of the documents sought for, in a BOOK I. Chapter III. BOOK 1. Chapter III. Gifts. handsome and effective manner. Great diversity, however, was observable in the treatment of the application, under precisely similar circumstances, by similar public functionaries. Of two of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State to whom on the same day the same solicitation was addressed, the one acceded in a manner as courteous as it was liberal, the other replied: "there seems to be no sufficient reason why the expense of such a distribution should be thrown upon the Public without the consent of Parliament." Whichever may have been right, it is perfectly clear that some intelligible and impartial system should be acted on in such cases. CHAPTER IV. PUBLIC HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC PRINTING. .. Albeit that mortal folk are marvellously separated both by land and water, yet are they and their acts (done peradventure by the space of a thousand years), compacted together by the Historiographer, as it were the deeds of one self-same city, and in one man's life. Wherefore I say that History may well be called a Divine Providence. ..... It is the keeper of such things as have been virtuously done, and the witness of evil deeds. By the benefit of History, all noble, high, and virtuous acts be immortal. BOURCHIER, Lord Berners (Preface to Froissart). Mere Parsimony is not Economy, It is separable in theory from it; and, in fact, it may, or it may not, be a part of Economy, according to circumstances. Expence, and great expence, may be an essential part in true Economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no power of combination, no comparison, no judgement. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The other Economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgement, and a firm and sagacious mind. BURKE (Letter to a Noble Lord-Works, viii, 31). THE nature, extent, and value of the books and documents which are printed at the public charge are so little known; the stolid caprice which has usually governed their distribution, or their uphoarding, is so Vol. II. 39 BOOK I. Chapter IV. Public Historio graphy and Pub lic Printing. BOOK 1. Chapter IV. graphy and Public Printing. little open to general observation; that some details on Public Historio this head may chance to be of direct and immediate utility. Obstructions to students, from want of access to documents for which the Public is heavily taxed, have exactly synchronized with complaints from printers and warehouse-keepers that present disorder and future peril were accruing from the weight and bulk of those very documents in store. It is within my personal knowledge that these two classes of facts have continued to co-exist for years, without ever suggesting to the official mind that the easy remedy for both was an act of simple duty. Distribution of the Parliamentary Papers. Any account of those printed public books and documents, the judicious distribution of which would be but a proper return to the Public for the cost of their production, may fitly begin with the papers of Parliament itself. At present there is much outcry,-fashionable but foolish,-about the dulness and inanity of the 'blue books.' A few smart sneers at the thousands of wearisome pages which every body pays for, and nobody reads, are usually amongst the earliest utterances of a newspaper fledgeling. Three classes of persons, indeed, it must be admitted, have solid grounds for their depreciation of our parliamentary literature. One class is in the predicament of the worthy justice who complained that nothing so much embarrassed a man in discharging judicial functions as the hearing of both sides. It is obviously a much easier thing to dash off a glib article on "Limited Liability," or on the "Treatment of Criminals," based on the current table-talk of the day, than it is to digest a body of evidence in which the question may BOOK I. Chapter IV. graphy and Pub be presented in fifty points of view, as it shapes Public Historioitself to fifty different observers, with ranges of vision lic Printing. as diversified as those of the eagle and the mole. Men of another class know well enough that veins of information both many and rich are to be found in the blue books, by those who will dig deep enough, but they think also that the fewer the partners, the more profitable would be the digging. And thus we have recently had proposals that, as a rule, nothing should be printed of the proceedings of Committees or Commissions of inquiry but the bare Report; all minutes of evidence and papers being carefully preserved "in an office at Westminster.”1 A third class consists of persons who appear to be themselves incapable of any lively interest in questions of education or social progress, and who are annoyed that there should be so much noise made about such things. Persons of this calibre accordingly, when asked how a reduction could best be effected in the excessive cost of public printing, reply that the best course would be to lop off the "Reports of the Committee of Council on Education, and those about Schools of Art and Design," which appear to them to be particularly flagrant instances of wasteful expenditure. And this is said in the face of an improvement in schools and teaching, under the energetic action of the Committee of Council and of the Poor Law Board, which forms one of the most striking and most pregnant of the social phenomena of 1 See Minutes of Evidence, etc. of Select Committee on Printing (Houses of Parliament), 1 Aug., 1855. 2 Ibid. |