when necessary, of a special rate upon heritable property within the respective districts. The levying of this rate was attended with so much difficulty and opposition that the Provincial Council passed a resolution in 1865 to render the continuance of the rate unnecessary, by increasing the annual fixed salaries of teachers from £50 to £100 each, and by bearing a larger share of the other expenses, the remainder being met by the school committees out of the school fees, supplemented by donations and subscriptions from the friends of the several schools.
PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND READING-ROOMS.
The Ordinance of 1864 authorised the Education Board to encourage the formation of public as well as school libraries by expending on the purchase of books to be placed in any such library, moneys equal in amount to any sum or sums raised by public subscription or otherwise within the district. Advantage was taken of this provision to a very considerable extent by the settlers throughout the Province, and the Otago Public Library scheme became somewhat widely and favourably known.[1]
The following extract relating to public libraries is taken from the Board's report for 1875—the last report published under the Provincial system:—"Books of the value of about £1,700 have been distributed among the public libraries during the past year. The amount expended by library committees on the purchase of books, or paid into the treasury by them, was
- ↑ "I went round the town (Lawrence), and visited the Athenæum, or reading-room. In all these towns there are libraries, and the books are strongly bound and well thumbed. Carlyle, Macaulay, and Dickens are certainly better known to small communities in New Zealand than they are to similar congregations of men and women at Home. The schools, hospitals, reading-rooms and University were all there, and all in useful operation, so that life in the Province of Otago may be said to be a happy life, and one in which men and women may, and do have food to eat and clothes to wear, books to read, and education to enable them to read the books."—Anthony Trollope's "Australia and New Zealand."
"The public library books are not only to be seen in the more comfortable and accessible dwellings in the settled districts. It is not an uncommon thing to find recently-published English books of a high class, bearing the Board's stamp upon them, in the shepherd's solitary abode among the hills, and in the digger's hut in gullies accessible only by mountain bridle-tracks." Otago Education Report for 1872.
