It seems the world has finally remembered that borders are not merely lines on a map, but the very scaffolding of civilised existence. The Haskell Free Library, that peculiar monument to cross-border amity straddling the US-Canada frontier, now boasts a Quebec-only entrance. To the shrill chorus of globalist hand-wringing, I say: about time. UK heritage groups, bless their historically-minded souls, have praised this sovereignty move. They understand what the bien-pensants refuse to grasp: that a library without a nation is a book without a spine.
Let us consider the facts. This library, long a darling of sentimentalists who swoon at the thought of a single building serving two countries, has been a source of quiet administrative absurdity. Patrons from Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, would mingle in the stacks, their passports as irrelevant as their political loyalties. A charming fiction, but fictions have a way of unravelling. The new entrance, restricted to Canadian citizens, signals a return to reality. It is a small but potent symbol: the nation-state reasserts itself.
From London, the applause is muted but genuine. British heritage groups, who know a thing or two about preserving cultural integrity, see this as a bulwark against the erosion of local identity. They recognise that a library must serve a community, and a community is defined by its sovereignty. The Haskell Free Library was an anomaly, a happy accident of nineteenth-century goodwill. But the nineteenth century is over. The global village has become a chaotic metropolis, and we need borders more than ever.
Critics will call this xenophobic, grotesque, a step backward. They will wring their hands about cooperation and shared humanity. But let them. The intellectual decadence of our age is precisely this refusal to acknowledge the primacy of national boundaries. When Quebec asserts its right to have its own entrance, it is not building a wall; it is clarifying a relationship. The library remains shared in spirit, but its physical reality now reflects the political one.
One almost hears the ghost of Edward Gibbon nodding in approval. The fall of Rome was precipitated by a loss of civic pride, a blurring of what it meant to be Roman. We are not there yet, but every small capitulation to borderlessness chips away at the foundations. The Haskell Free Library, by embracing a Quebec-only entrance, has performed a public service. It reminds us that identity matters, that the particular trumps the universal.
Let the detractors sneer. UK heritage groups have it right. There is dignity in this move, a quiet assertion of the local over the global. The library will survive, even thrive, as a testament to the fact that neighbours can coexist without dissolving their differences. And perhaps, in time, another entrance will appear on the American side. But that is a matter for Vermont. For now, Quebec has its door. The world should take notes.
