e cause of learning has
sustained from the burning of public, university and ecclesiastical
libraries are far greater than the cost which the provision of fire-proof
repositories would have entailed.

Of late years, there has been a partial reform in library construction.
Some have been built fire-proof throughout, with only stone, brick,
concrete and iron material, even to the floors and window casings. Many
more have had iron shelves and iron stacks to hold the shelves
constructed, and there are now several competing manufacturers of these
invaluable safeguards to books. The first library interior constructed
wholly of iron was that of the Library of Congress at Washington, which
had been twice consumed, first when the Capitol was burned by the British
army in 1814, and again in 1851, through a defective flue, when only
20,000 volumes were saved from the flames, out of a total of 55,000. The
example of iron construction has been slowly followed, until now the
large cities have most of their newly-constructed libraries approximately
fire-proof, although many are exposed to fire in parts, owing to a
niggardly and false economy. The lesson that what is worth doing at all
is worth doing well, and that every neglect of security brings sooner or
later irreparable loss, is very slowly learned. Whole hecatombs of books
have been sacrificed to the spirit of commercial greed, blind or
short-sighted enough not to see that secure protection to public
property, though costlier at first, is far cheaper in the end. You may
speak of insurance against library losses by fire, but what insurance
could restore the rare and costly Shakespearean treasures of the
Birmingham Free Library, or the unique and priceless manuscripts that
went up in flames in the city library of Strasburg, in 1870, or the many
precious and irreplaceable manuscript archives of so many of our States,
burned in the conflagration of their capitols?

One would think that the civilized world had had lessons enough, ever
since that seventh century burning of the Alexandrian library by the
Caliph Omar, with that famous but apocryphal rhetorical dilemma, put in
his mouth perhaps by some nimble-witted reporter:--"If these books agree
with the Koran, they are useless, and should be burned: if not, they are
pernicious, and must not be spared." But the heedless world goes
carelessly on, deaf to the voice of reason, and the lessons of history,
amid the holocausts of literature