OCR Text |
Show Ill LI Hit A RY. The Pioneer Library association asks for an appropriation of $1000 a year from the city. This i a modest request and should be granted. Thriving western cities have everywhere the reputation of doing well for their citizens in all such beneficial educational educa-tional matters and it has been the reproach of Salt Lake City for years that it contained no free public library. All honor is due to the masonic fraternity for having furnished this city the only library to which the public have access. They did this at very considerable consid-erable expense to themselves and yet they were forced to charge tifty cents a month for the use of books. This excluded the very class of readers to whom a public library is of the greatest benefit; young men and women out of employment and boys and girls hungering for knowledge, but whoe parents do not s mpathize w.t 1 their aspirations. aspir-ations. The thing which every enterprising city east and west nowadays does as soon as possibie is to furnish a free library with a reading room, open day and evening, for the use of ail persons who 1 r ar a ds of introduction intro-duction from responsible residents. A considerable part of the city revenue comes from taxing vice in several forms and it is only just and proper that a certain portion of this fund should be turned into channels where it may do something in the way of preventing vice and crime and no agency therefor can be thought of that, as the years roll on, is more effectual then a free public library with inviting and convenient conven-ient reading rooms. Wc hope that no plea of economy, nor the laudable desire to see other schemes for the improving aud beau-tifjing beau-tifjing of the city will be allowed to crowd out the favorable consideration of this modest mod-est petition. |