you secure permanence of guardianship in passionless keeping... what a noble thing it would be if the nobility should take to giving their precious collections to the Corporation... and then they would be open to the multitude. I hope in time that this Corporation will be as rich in pictures and works of art as it has already become in books, for I believe that one of the highest offices of civilisation is to determine how to give access to the masterpieces of art and of literature to the whole people. There is no object higher and nobler than that – to make Raphael common, to make Michelangelo intelligible, to the multitudes, to lay open to the workman and the peasant what heretofore only ranks and riches could command. And this freedom from payment is the glory of this library. There are few places that I would rather haunt after my death than this room, and there are few things I would have my children remember more than this, that this man spoke the discourse at the opening of this glorious library, the first fruits of a clear understanding that a great town exists to discharge towards the people of that town the duties that a great nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation – that a town exists by the Grace of God, that a great town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of a man’s intellectual and moral nature. We are a Corporation who have undertaken the highest duty that is possible for us – we have made provision for our people – for all our people – and we have made a provision of God’s greatest and best gifts unto Man. (Loud cheers)18 Dawson’s speech is a model of Late-Victorian idealism. It is an exhortation to the Council to take up the ‘improving’ tenets of the Civic Gospel. The speech is laced with a sublime faith in the beneficial and improving impact of great art and literature and of the accumulated wisdom refined from centuries of Man’s history.
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