Custom has decreed that the presiding officer shall deliver a message, and the present presiding officer has not sufficient independence of mind to depart from that long-established custom. Turning for a text to Victor Hugo's stirring epic of Paris, these words may be found in the section for May, and in the third chapter thereof:.
When Johann Gutenberg in his secret workshop poured the molten metal into the rough matrices he had cut for separate types, the instrument for the spread of Democracy was created. When early Cavaliers and Puritans planted the crude beginnings of free public schools, the forces of Democracy were multiplied. When half a century ago the first meager beginnings of the public library movement were evolved, Democracy was for all time assured. Thus have three great stages, separated each by a span of two hundred years from that preceding, marked that world development whose ultimate meaning is not equality of station or possession, but equality of opportunity.
Not without stress and strife have these yet fragmentary results been achieved. Not without travail and difficulties will universal acceptance be accorded in the days to come. But no one may doubt the final outcome which shall crown the struggle of the centuries. The world was old when typography was invented. Less than five centuries have passed since then, and in this interval—but a brief period in the long history of human endeavor—there has been more enlargement of opportunity for the average man and woman than in all the time that went before.
Without the instrumentality of the printed page, without the reproductive processes that give to all the world in myriad tongues the thought of all the centuries, slavery, serfdom and feudalism would still shackle the millions not so fortunate as to be born to purple and ermine, and fine linen.
The evolution of the book is therefore the history of the unfoldment of human rights. The chained tome in its medieval prison cell has been supplanted by the handy volume freely sent from the hospitable public library to the homes of the common people.
