library work. It should not be forgotten, however, that its success in
dealing with both kinds of problems is still conditioned by the laws
already laid down. The general association, as it grows larger, will be
marked less and less by the enthusiasm of the specialist, will be less and
less efficient, will move more slowly, will deliver its opinions with
reticence and will hesitate to act upon them. The smaller constituent
bodies will be affected by none of these drawbacks, but their purposes
appeal to the few and their actions, though more energetic, will often
seem to the majority of the larger group devoid of meaning. This is, of
course, the case with the National Educational Association, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and hosts of similar bodies
here and abroad. To state the difficulty is merely to confess that all
attempts hitherto have failed to form a group that is at once
comprehensive, powerful and efficient, both in the larger matters with
which it deals and in details.

Probably the most successful attempt of this kind is formulated in the
Constitution of the United States itself and is being carried on in our
country from day to day, yet successful as it is, our history is witness,
and the daily press testifies, that the combination of general and local
governments has its weak points and is dependent for its smooth working on
the cordial consent and forbearance of the governed. This is true also of
smaller combinations. In our own organization it is easy to find fault, it
is easy to discover points of friction; only by the cordial effort of
every member to minimize these points can such an organization begin to
accomplish its aims. Failure is much more apt to be due to lack of
appreciation of this fact than to any defect in the machinery of
organization. This being the case we are thrown back upon consideration of
the membership of our institution. How should it be selected and how
constituted?

The constitution of the association says that "Any person or institution
engaged in library work may become a member by paying the annual dues, and
others after election by the executive board." We have thus two classes of
members, those by their own choice and those by election. The annual lists
of members do not record the distinction, but among those in the latest
list we find 24 booksellers, 17 publishers, 5 editors, 9 school and
college officials, 8 government employees not in libraries, and 24 wives
and relatives of other members, while in the case of 132 persons no
qualification is stated in the list. We have or have had as our
associates, settlement workers, lawyers, lecturers, indexers, binders, and
so on almost indefinitely. Our membership is thus freely open to
librarians, interpreting this word very broadly, and to any others that we
may desire to have with us, which means, practically, any who have
sufficient interest in library work to come to the meetings. We must,
therefore, be classed with what may be called the "open" as opposed to the
"closed" professional or technical associations. The difference may be
emphasized by a reference to two well-known New York clubs, the Players
and the Authors. These organizations would appear by their names to be
composed respectively of actors and writers. The former, however, admits
also to membership persons interested in the drama, which may mean little
or much, while the Authors Club, despite repeated efforts to broaden it
out in the same way, has insisted on admitting none but _bona fide_
authors. In advocacy of the first plan it may be said that by adopting it
the Players has secured larger membership, embracing many men of means.
Its financial standing is better and it is enabled to own a fine club
house. On the other hand, the Authors has a small membership, and owns
practically no property, but makes up in _esprit de corps_ what it lacks
in these other respects. It is another phase of the question of
specialization that we have already considered. The larger and broader
body has certain advantages, the smaller and more compact, certain others.
We have, doubtless been right in deciding, or rather in accepting what
circumstances seem to have decided for us, that our own association shall
be of the larger and less closely knit type, following the analogy of the
National Educational Association and the various associations for the
advancement of science, American, British and French, rather than that of
the Society of Civil Engineers, for instance, or the various learned
academies. Our body has thus greater general but less special influence,
just as on a question of general scientific policy a petition from the
American association might carry greater weight, whereas on a question of
engineering it would be incomparably inferior to an opinion of the civil
engineers. There is in this country, it is true, a general scientific body
of limited membership--the National Academy of Sciences, which speaks both
on general and special questions with expert authority. In the formation
of the American Library Institute it was sought to create some such
special body of librarians, but it is too soon to say whether or not that
expectation is to be fulfilled. The fact remains that in the American
Library Association we are committed to very nearly the broadest plan of
organization and work that is possible. We are united only by our
connection with library work or our interest in its success, and are thus
limited in our discussions and actions as a body to the most general
problems that may arise in this connection, leaving the special work to
our sections and affiliated societies, which are themselves somewhat
hampered by our size in the treatment of the particular subjects that come
before them, inasmuch as they are not separate groups whose freedom of
action no one can call in question.

In illustration of the limitations of a general body of the size and scope
of our Association, I may perhaps be allowed to adduce the recent
disagreement among librarians regarding the copyright question, or rather
regarding the proper course to be followed in connection with the
conference on that question called by the Librarian of Congress. It will
be remembered that this conference was semi-official and was due to the
desire of members of Congress to frame a bill that should be satisfactory
to the large number of conflicting interests involved. To this conference
our Association was invited to send, and did send, delegates. It is
obvious that if these and all the other delegates to the conference had
simply held out for the provisions most favorable to themselves no
agreement would have been possible and the objects of the conference would
have been defeated. Recognizing this, all the bodies and interests
represented worked from the beginning to secure an agreement, striving
only that it should be such as would represent a minimum of concession on
all sides. This view was shared by the delegates of this Association. The
law as it stood was, it is true, most favorable to libraries in its
provisions regarding importation, and the retention of these provisions
might have been facilitated by withdrawal from the conference and
subsequent opposition to whatever new bill might have been framed. But the
delegates assumed that they were appointed to confer, not to withdraw, and
that if the Association had desired to hold aloof from the conference that
result would have been best attained by appointing no delegates at all.
The Association's delegates accordingly joined with their fellows in the
spirit of compromise to agree on such a bill as might be least
unacceptable to all, and the result was a measure slightly, but only
slightly, less favorable to libraries than the existing law. With the
presentation of this bill to the proper committees of Congress, and a
formal statement that they approved it on behalf of the Association, the
duties of the delegates ended. And here begins to appear the applicability
of this chapter from library history to what has preceded. The action of
the delegates was officially that of the Association. But it was
disapproved by very many members of the Association on the ground that it
seemed likely to result in lessening the importation privilege of
libraries. Whether these dissidents were in a majority or not it seemed
impossible to say. The Association's legislative body, the Council, twice
refused to disapprove or instruct the delegates, thus tacitly approving
their action, but the dissidents asserted that the Council, in this
respect, did not rightly reflect the opinion of the Association. The whole
situation was an instructive illustration of the difficulty of getting a
large body of general scope to act on a definite, circumscribed question,
or even of ascertaining its opinion or its wishes regarding such action.
Recognizing this, the dissidents properly and wisely formed a separate
association with a single end in view--the retention of present library
importation privileges, and especially the defeat of the part of the bill
affecting such privileges as drafted in the conference. The efforts of
this body have been crowned with success in that the bill as reported by
the committee contains a modified provision acceptable to the dissidents.
Thus a relatively small body formed for a definite purpose has quickly
accomplished that purpose, while the objects of the larger body have been
expressed but vaguely, and so far as they have been definitely formulated
have failed of accomplishment. There is a lesson in this both for our own
association and for others.

It must not be assumed, however, that limitation of action along the lines
I have indicated means weakness of organization. On the contrary, foreign
observers have generally testified to the exceptional strength and
efficiency of societies and groups of all kinds in this country. It may be
interesting to quote here what a recent French writer on the United States
has to say of the part played by associations of all kinds in our national
life. And, in passing, he who is proud of his country nowadays should read
what is said of her by French and German, and even English writers. The
muck-raking is all on this side of the water. The writer from whom I
quote, M. Paul de Rousiers, author of "La Vie Américaine," does not
commend without discrimination, which makes what he has to say of more
value. He notes at the outset that "the spirit of free association is
widely extended in the United States, and it produces results of
surprising efficiency." There are two motives for association, he thinks,
the consciousness of weakness, which is generally operative abroad, and
the consciousness of strength, which is our motive here. He says:

The need of association comes generally from the conscience of
one's own feebleness or indolence.... When such people join they
add together their incapacities; hence the failure of many
societies formed with great eclat. On the contrary, when men
accustomed to help themselves without depending on their neighbors
form an association, it is because they really find themselves
facing a common difficulty ... such persons add their capacities;
they form a powerful union of capables, the only one that has
force. Hence the general success of American associations.

The radical difference in the motives for association here and in the old
world was noted long ago by De Tocqueville, who says:

European societies are naturally led to introduce into their midst
military customs and formulas.... The members of such associations
respond to a word of command like soldiers in a campaign; they
profess the dogma of passive obedience, or rather, by uniting,
they sacrifice entirely, at a single stroke, their judgment and
free will.... In American associations, on the other hand,
individual independence finds its part; as in society every man
moves at the same time toward the same goal, but all are not
forced to go by the same road. No one sacrifices his will or his
reason, but applies them both toward the success of the common
enterprise.

Commenting on this, De Rousiers goes on:

This is not to say that the discipline necessary to the pursuit of
the common end is less exact than with us. As far as I can judge,
the members of an American association, on the contrary, take
their obligations more seriously than we, and precisely because
they have undertaken them very freely, without being forced into
them by environment or fashion, and also because the heads of the
association have not sought to make it serve their own interests.
In fine, their discipline is strong, but it is applied only to one
precise object; it may thus subsist intact and without tyranny,
despite the most serious divergences of view among the members
regarding objects foreign to its aim. These happy conditions--this
large and concrete mind, joined to the effective activity of the
Americans, have given rise to a multitude of groups that are
rendering the greatest service.

De Rousiers enlarges on this point at great length and gives many
illustrations. He returns to it even when he appears to have gone on to
other subjects. In an account of a visit to a militia encampment in
Massachusetts, where he was inclined at the outset to scoff at the lack of
formal military training, but finally became enthusiastic over the
individual efficiency and interest of the militiamen, he ends by saying:

What I have seen here resembles what I have seen everywhere
throughout the United States; each organism, each individual,
preserves all its freedom, as far as it can; hence the limited and
special character of the public authorities, to whom little is
left to do. This doubtless detracts from the massed effects that
we are in the habit of producing; we are apt to think that this
kind of liberty is only disorder; but individual efforts are more
energetic and when they converge toward a single end, by
spontaneous choice of each will, their power is incalculable. This
it is that makes the strength of America.

An interesting and satisfactory summary. There is, however, another way of
looking at it. A well-known scientific man recently expressed to me his
conviction that an "American" association of any kind is destined to
failure, whether it be of scientific men, commercial travellers or
plumbers. By "American" here he meant continental in extent. There may
thus be, according to this view, a successful Maine hotel-keeper's
association, a New York bar association, or a Pennsylvania academy of fine
arts, but no such body truly representative of the whole United States.
Many such organizations are "American" or "National" in name only; for
instance, the "American" Academy of Sciences, which is a Boston
institution, or the "National" Academy of Fine Arts, which belongs to New
York City. Many bodies have attempted to obviate this trouble by the
creation of local sections in different parts of the country, and the
newly-formed Society of Illuminating Engineers has, I understand, in mind
the organization of perfectly co-ordinate bodies in various parts of the
country, without any attempt to create a central body having headquarters
at a definite place. This is somewhat as if the American Library
Association should consist of the federated state associations, perhaps
with a council consisting of a single representative from each. It would
seem to be a workable and rather attractive plan. We may remind ourselves
again that the United States itself is the classic example of an American
association, and that it has been fairly successful by adopting this very
system. Our recognition of the necessity of local divisions in our own
association and of close affiliation with the various state bodies is
shown by the recent resolution of the council providing for sectional
meetings and by the presence at this and several other state meetings in
the present month of an official representative of the American Library
Association. That these, or similar means of making our national body
continental in something more than name are necessary we may freely admit.
Possibly it may take some years of experimentation, ending perhaps in
appropriate constitutional revision, to hit upon the best arrangement. Too
much centralization is bad; but there must be some centralization. We must
have our capital and our legislative and administrative machinery, as the
United States has at Washington. For legislative purposes our Washington
is a shifting one. It is wherever the Association may hold its annual
meeting and wherever the Council may convene in the interim. For such
administrative and executive purposes as require a fixed location, our
Washington is for the present in Boston. Next year it may be elsewhere;
but whether it shall remain there or move to some other place would seem
to be a matter of small importance. Wherever it may be, it will be
inaccessible to a large majority of American librarians. If immediate
accessibility is a requisite, therefore, some of its functions may and
should be divided. It may not be too much to look forward to a sectional
headquarters in every state in the Union, related perhaps to the general
headquarters somewhat as branch libraries to a central library, or,
perhaps, carried on under the auspices of the state associations. At any
rate, it is encouraging to reflect that we are not insensible to the
obstacles in the way of making our own, or any other association truly
American in scope, and are experimenting toward obviating them.

All these considerations appear to me to lead to one conclusion--the duty
of every librarian to become and remain a member of the American Library
Association. I do not desire to dwell on the direct advantages that
membership offers--these are not few, and they are sufficiently obvious.
Possibly most of those who are likely to be affected by them are already
members of the Association. I would recommend for consideration higher
grounds than these. Instead of asking the question, "What is there in it
for me?" I should inquire, "What is there in it for other people?" How
will it benefit the general status of library work, the general standing
of librarians in the community, the influence of libraries on those who
use or ought to use them--these and a hundred other elements of progress
that are closely bound up with the success of library effort, but that may
not add to the welfare of any one individual.

There seems to be no doubt that the answers to these questions all point
toward increased membership. As we have chosen to work along the broader
lines and by the energy of mass rather than that of velocity--with the
sledge-hammer rather than the rifle bullet--it is surely our duty to make
that mass as efficient and as impressive as possible, which means that it
must be swelled to the largest possible proportions. Large membership may
be efficient in two ways, by united weight and by pervasiveness. An army
is powerful in the first way. Ten thousand men concentrated in one spot
may strike a sledge-hammer blow and carry all before them. Yet the same
ten thousand men may police a great city without even seeing one another.
Scattered about on different beats they are everywhere. Every block or two
one meets a patrol and the sense of security that they give is
overwhelming. It is in this way, it seems to me, that large membership in
the American Library Association may be effective. We meet together but
once a year, and even then we do not bring out our full force. We have no
intention of marching on Washington _en masse_ to secure legislation or
even of forcing our trustees to raise salaries by a general library
strike. But if we can make it an unusual thing for a librarian not to be a
member of the American Library Association; if wherever one goes he meets
our members and recognizes what they stand for, then, it seems to me,
public opinion of librarians and librarianship is sure to rise. Our two
savages, who band together for a few moments to lift a log, become by that
act of association marked men among their fellows; the mere fact that they
have intelligence enough to work together for any purpose raises them
above the general level. It is not alone that increasing numbers,
strength, and influence make for the glory of the Association itself; the
most successful bodies of this kind are those that exalt, not themselves
but the professions, localities or ideals that they represent. It is
because increasing our numbers and scattering our membership throughout
the land will increase the influence of the library and strengthen the
hands of those who work in it that I believe such increase a worthy object
of our effort. Associations and societies come and go, form and disband;
they are no more immortal than the men and women that compose them. Yet an
association, like a man, should seek to do the work that lies before it
with all its strength, and to keep that strength at its maximum of
efficiency. So doing, it may rest content that, be its accomplishment
large or small, its place in the history of human endeavor is worthy and
secure.




MODERN EDUCATIONAL METHODS


Those who complain that the average of general education has been lowered
are both right and wrong--right literally and wrong in the general
impression that they give. It is undoubtedly true that among young persons
with whom an educated adult comes intellectually in contact the average of
culture is lower than it was twenty years ago. This is not, however,
because the class of persons who were well educated then are to-day less
well trained, but rather because the class has been recruited from the
ignorant classes, by the addition of persons who were not educated at all
then, or educated very slightly, and who are now receiving a higher,
though still inadequate degree of training. In other words the average of
education among all persons in the community is higher, but the average
among educated persons is lower, because the educated class has been
enlarged by the addition of large numbers of slightly educated persons.

This phenomenon is common to all stages of progress in all sorts of
things. It is true, for instance, in the general advance of the world in
civilization. The average degree of appreciation of art among persons who
know anything of art at all is less, for instance, than in the days of
ancient Greece, because the class of art-lovers throughout the world is
vastly larger and includes a very large number of persons whose
appreciation of art is slight and crude. There is, nevertheless, a greater
total amount of love for art, and a higher average of art education,
taking into account the world's entire population, than there was then.
Let us state the case mathematically: If, of one thousand persons, ten
have a hundred dollars each and the rest nothing, a gift of five dollars
each to five hundred others will raise the average amount owned by each of
the thousand, but will greatly lower the average amount held by the
property owners in the group, who will now number 510, instead of ten.

"How do you demonstrate all this?" will probably be asked. I do not know
of any statistical data that will enable it to be proved directly, but it
is certain that education is becoming more general, which must increase
the number of partly educated persons having an imperfect educational
background--a lack of ancestral training and home influence. Thus, among
the persons with whom the educated adult comes in contact, he necessarily
meets a larger number of individuals than formerly who betray lack of
education in speech, writing or taste; and he wrongly concludes that the
schools are not doing their work properly. If the schools were not doing
their work properly, we should have direct statistical evidence of it, and
all the direct evidence I have seen goes to show that the schools are
accomplishing more to-day and accomplishing it by better methods, than
ever before.

Similarly, I believe that the totality of teaching ability in the
profession has increased. The conspicuous failures are persons who are
unfit to be teachers and who have been drafted into service because of our
sudden increase in educational plant. The result in some cases has been a
curious aberration in disciplinary methods--a freakishness that is
inseparable from any sudden advance such as we are making.

Our schools can and will advance much further in personnel, methods and
results; but they are by no means on the downward path now. One way in
which they may do better work is by greater appreciation of their
selective as well as their training function.

Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity of
potatoes to be prepared for food. Our present educational methods are a
good deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole into
either jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitrary
way unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation. We are
giving in our educational institutions many degrees and many kinds of
training without proper selection of the persons to whom the training is
to be applied. Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made on
arbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness. One boy's education
lasts ten years, and another's two, not because the former is fitted to
profit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens to
have money and inclination to give it to him. One young man studies
medicine and another goes into business, not because these are the careers
for which they are specially fitted, but because one thinks that the
prefix "Doctor" would look well in front of his name and the other has a
maternal uncle in the dry-goods trade.

I am not so foolish as to think that selection of this kind could ever be
made with unerring accuracy, but I do assert that an effort should be made
to effect it in a greater degree through our regular educational
institutions and to leave it less to chance. Our present methods are like
those of wild nature, which scatters seeds broadcast in the hope that some
may settle on favoring soil, rather than those of the skilled cultivator,
who sees that seed and soil are fitted for each other.

In this and other particulars I look for great improvement in our
educational methods; but I do not think that, except in local and
unessential particulars, here and there, they are now retrograding.




SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES[4]

[4] Read at the opening of the Chestnut Hill Branch, Philadelphia
Free Library, January 22, 1909.


Of the three great divisions of economics--production, distribution and
consumption--the library has to do chiefly with the second, and it is as a
distributor of literature that I desire to speak of it, although it has
its share both in the production and consumption of books--more briefly,
in the writing and reading of them. Much writing of books is done wholly
in libraries and by their aid, and much reading is done therein. These
functions I pass by with this brief notice.

A library distributes books. So does a bookseller. The functions of these
two distributors, however, should differ somewhat as do those of the two
producers of books--the author and the publisher. The author creates the
soul of the book and the publisher gives it a body. The former produces
the immaterial, possibly the eternal, part and the latter merely the
material part. Likewise, in our distribution we librarians should lay
stress upon what is in the book, upon the production of the author rather
than on that of the publisher, though we may not neglect the latter. We
are, however, eminently distributors of ideas rather than of mere
merchandise, and in so far as we lay stress on the material side of the
book--important as this is--and neglect what is in it, we are but traders
in books and not librarians.

Among many of the great distributors of ideas--the magazine, the
newspaper, the school--it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any
that do not feel what I may call an anti-civic tendency. They have come to
be supported largely by other agencies than the public, and they are
naturally controlled by those agencies. As for the public, it has become
accustomed to paying less than cost for what it gets along these lines,
and is thus becoming intellectually pauperized. It is no more possible to
distribute ideas at a profit, as a commercial venture, nowadays, than it
would have been to run a circus, with an admission fee, in Imperial Rome.
Thus a literary magazine is possible only because it is owned by some
publisher who uses it as an advertising medium. He can afford to sell it
to the public for less than cost; the public would leave a publication
sold at a fair profit severely alone, hence such a venture is impossible.
A scientific magazine in like manner must have some one to back it--a firm
of patent-office brokers or a scientific society. The daily papers depend
almost wholly on their advertisements; the public would not buy a simple
compilation of the day's news at a fair profit. Even our great
institutions of higher education give their students more than the latter
pay for; the student is getting part of his tuition for nothing. A college
that depends wholly on tuition fees for its support is soon left without
students. Thus all these disseminators of ideas are not dependent on the
persons to whom they distribute those ideas, for whose interest it is that
the ideas shall be good and true and selected with discrimination. They
depend rather for support on outside bodies of various kinds and so tend
to be controlled by them--bodies whose interests do not necessarily
coincide with those of the public. This is not true of material things.
Their distributors still strive to please the public, for it is by the
public that they are supported. If the public wants raspberry jam,
raspberry jam it gets; and if, being aroused, it demands that this shall
be made out of raspberries instead of apples, dock-seeds and aniline, it
ultimately has its way. But if the department store were controlled by
some outside agency, benevolent or otherwise, which partly supported it
and enabled it to sell its wares below cost, then if this controlling
agency willed that we should eat dock-seeds and aniline--dock-seeds and
aniline we should doubtless eat.

Not that the controlling powers in all these instances are necessarily
malevolent. The publisher who owns a literary magazine may honestly desire
that it shall be fearlessly impartial. The learned body that runs a
scientific periodical may be willing to admit to its pages a defense of a
thesis that it has condemned in one of its meetings; the page-advertiser
in a great daily may be able to see his pet policy attacked in its
editorial columns without yielding to the temptation to bring pressure to
bear; the creator of an endowed university may view with equanimity an
attack by one of its professors on the methods by which he amassed his
wealth. All these things may be; we know in fact that they have been and
that they are. But unfortunately we all know of cases where the effect of
outside control has been quite the contrary. The government of a
benevolent despot, we are told, would be ideal; but alas! rules for making
a despot benevolent and for ensuring that he and his successors shall
remain so, are not yet formulated. We have fallen back on the plan of
fighting off the despot--good though he may possibly be; would that we
could also abolish the non-civic control of the disseminators of ideas!

Are there, then, no disseminators of ideas free from interference? Yes,
thank heaven, there are at least two--the public school and the public
library. Of these, the value of academic freedom to the public school is
slight, because the training of the very young is of its nature subject
little to the influences of which we have spoken. There is little
opportunity, during a grammar school or high school course, to influence
the mind in favor of particular government policies and particular
theories in science or literature or art. This opportunity comes later.
And it is later that the public library does its best work. Supported by
the public it has no impulse and no desire to please anyone else. No
suspicion of outside control hangs over it. It receives gifts; but they
are gifts to the public, held by the public, not by outsiders. It is
tax-supported, and the public pays cost price for what it gets--no more
and no less. The community has the power of abolishing the whole system in
the twinkling of an eye. The library's power in an American municipality
lies in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its
position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of
my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no
religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a
blight over it. It is untrammeled.

How long is it to remain thus? That is for its owners, the public, to say.
I confess that I feel uneasy when I realize how little the influence of
the public library is understood by those who might try to wield that
influence, either for good or for evil. Occasionally an individual tries
to use it sporadically--the poet who tries to secure undying fame by
distributing free copies of his verses to the libraries, the manufacturer
who gives us an advertisement of his product in the guise of a book, the
enthusiast who runs over our shelf list to see whether the library is well
stocked with works on his fad--socialism or Swedenborgianism, or the "new
thought." But, so far, there has been no concerted, systematic effort on
the part of classes or bodies of men to capture the public library, to
dictate its policy, to utilize its great opportunities for influencing the
public mind. When this ever comes, as it may, we must look out!

So far as my observation goes, the situation--even the faintest glimmering
of it--is far from dawning on most of these bodies. Most individuals, when
the policy of the library suits them not, exhaust their efforts in an
angry kick or an epistolary curse; they never even think of trying to
change that policy, even by argument. Most of them would rather write a
letter to a newspaper, complaining of a book's absence, than to ask the
librarian to buy it. Organizations--civil, religious, scientific,
political, artistic--have usually let us severely alone, where their
influence, if they should come into touch with the library, would surely
be for good--would be exerted along the line of morality, of more careful
book selection, of judicial mindedness instead of one-sidedness.

Let us trust that influences along this line--if we are to have influences
at all--may gain a foothold before the opposite forces--those of sordid
commercialism, of absurdities, of falsities, of all kinds of
self-seeking--find out that we are worth their exploitation.

When it comes, as I expect it will some day--this general realization of
what only a few now understand--that the public library is worth trying to
influence and to exploit, our trouble will be that we shall be without any
machinery at all to receive it, to take care of it, to direct the good
into proper channels and to withstand the evil. We are occasionally
annoyed and disconcerted now by the infinitesimal amount of it that we
see; we wish people would mind their own business; we detest meddlers; we
should be able to do more work if it were not for the bores--and so on.
But what--what in heaven's name shall we do with the deluge when it comes?
With what dam shall we withstand it; through what sluices shall we lead
it; into what useful turbines shall we direct it? These things are worth
pondering.

For the present then, this independence of the library as a distributor
may be regarded as one of its chief economic advantages. Another is its
power as a leveler, and hence as an adjunct of democracy. Democracy is a
result, not a cause, of equality. It is natural in a community whose
members resemble each other in ability, modes of thought and mental
development, just as it is unthinkable where great natural differences
racial or otherwise, exist. If we wish to preserve democracy, therefore,
we must first maintain our community on something like a level. And we
must level it up, not down; for although a form of democracy may exist
temporarily among individuals equally ignorant or degraded, the advent of
a single person more advanced in the scale of ability, quickly transforms
it into absolutism. Similar inequalities may result in an aristocratic
régime. The reason why England, with its ancient aristocracy, on the
whole, is so democratic, is that its commoners are constantly recruited by
the younger sons of its nobility, so that the whole body politic is
continually stirred and kept more homogeneous than on the continent, where
all of a noble's sons and daughters are themselves noble. This stirring or
levelling process may be effected in many ways and along many lines, but
in no way better than by popular education, as we have well understood in
this country. This is why our educational system is a bulwark of our form
of government, and this is why the public library--the only continuous
feature of that system, exercising its influence from earliest childhood
to most advanced age--is worth to the community whatever it may cost in
its most improved form. There are enough influences at work to segregate
classes in our country, and they come to us ready-made from other
countries; we may be thankful that the public library is helping to make
Americans of our immigrants and to make uniformly cultivated and
well-informed Americans of us all.

Another interesting light on the functions of the printed page, and hence
of the library, is shown by the recent biological theory that connects the
phenomena of heredity with those of habit and memory. The inheritance of
ancestral characteristics, according to this view, may be described as
racial memory. To illustrate, we may take an interesting study of a family
of Danish athletes, recently made and published in France. The members of
this family, adults and children, men and women, have all been gymnasts
for over three hundred years--no one of them would think of adopting any
other means of gaining a livelihood. It seems certain to the scientific
men who have been conducting the investigation, that not only the physical
ability to become an acrobat, but also the mental qualities that
contribute so much to success in this occupation--pride in the acrobatic
pre-eminence of the family, courage, love of applause, and so on--have
been handed down from one generation to another, and that it has cost each
generation less time and effort to acquire its skill than its predecessor.
In other words, we are told, members of this family are born with certain
predispositions--latent ancestral memories, we may say, of the occupations
of previous generations. To make these effective, it is necessary only to
awaken them, and this may be done simply by the sight of other persons
performing gymnastic feats. These they learn in weeks, where others,
without such ancestral memories, would require months or years.

Evidently this may be applied much more widely than to mere physical
skill. Few of us can boast of gymnastic ancestry, but all of us have
inherited predispositions and have ancestral memories that make it easier
for us to learn certain things and to choose certain courses than we
should find it without them. Some of these are good; some bad. Some are
useful; some injurious. It is necessary only to awaken them to set going a
train of consequences; if not awakened, they may remain permanently
dormant. How important, therefore, are the suggestions that may serve as
such awakeners; how necessary to bring forward the useful, and to banish
the injurious ones!

Now of all possible agencies that may bring these predispositions into
play--that may awaken our ancestral memories, if you choose to adopt this
theory--I submit that the book stands at the very head. For it is itself a
racial record; it may contain, in the form best suited to awaken our
predispositions, the very material which, long ages ago, was instrumental
in handing those predispositions down to us. It is in tune with our latent
memories, and it may set them vibrating more vigorously than any merely
contemporary agency.

Does this not place in a new and interesting light the library and the
books of which it is composed? We have learned to respect them as the
records of the race and to recognize their value as teachers and their
power as energizers; in addition we now see that they may act as fingers
on invisible mental triggers. A slight impulse--altogether trivial
compared with its effect--and off goes the gun. The discharge may carry a
line to a wrecked ship, or it may sink her with all on board.

We frequently hear it said of some book whose tendency is bad: "Well, it
can't hurt me, anyway; I'm immune." Are you quite sure? Have you gone
quite to the bottom of those ancestral memories of yours, and are you
certain that there are none that such a book may rouse, to your harm?

On the other hand, does this not explain much that has always interested
the librarian; for instance, the vast popularity of fairy tales,
especially those that date back to our racial infancy? I need dwell no
further on the economic importance of the book as viewed from this
standpoint.

But it has also a function almost diametrically opposed to that which we
have just considered; besides harking back to what is oldest it looks
forward to what is newest. It may stir us by awakening dim racial
recollections; but it may also thrill us by adding to the store of what is
already in the mind. In fact, we like to assimilate new ideas, to think
new thoughts, to do new acts; we like to read or hear something that we
could not have produced ourselves. When we are young and ignorant,
therefore, we like music or art or literature that appears trivial to us
as we grow older and have developed our own creative powers. A poem that
is no better than one a man might dash off himself he likes no longer; he
prefers to be confronted with something that is above and beyond his own
powers, though not above his comprehension. Thus, as he grows, his zone of
enjoyment shifts upward, and the library covers the whole moving field.
When Solomon John Peterkin, pen in hand, sat down to write a book, he
discovered that he hadn't anything to say. Happy lad! He had before him
all literature as a field of enjoyment, for all, apparently, was beyond
his creative efforts.

Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended the
relations between the tonic and the dominant chords? I have heard a small
boy at a piano play these alternately for hours. Such a performance is
torture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it is
new and has just come into his sphere of creative power. When he is
thoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandons
it for something newer and a little higher. The boy who discovers, without
being told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces a
certain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par with
Wagner's searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that are
often beyond technical explanation.

The child who reads what you think is a trivial book, re-reads it, and
reads others like it, is doing this same thing in the domain of
literature--he is following the natural course that will bring him out at
the top after a while.

When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but
potential. A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface,
but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of
which we have touched on but a few--the invisible ancestral memories of
centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our older selves and
our posterity of centuries hence. When we think of it, it is hard to
realize that a book has not a soul.

Gerald Stanley Lee, in his latest book, a collection of essays on
millionaires, sneers at the efforts of the rich mill owners to improve
their employees by means of libraries. Life in a modern mill, he thinks,
is so mechanical as to dull all the higher faculties. "Andrew Carnegie,"
he says (and he apparently uses the name merely as that of a type), "has
been taking men's souls away and giving them paper books."

Now the mills may be soul-deadening--possibly they are, though it is hard
to benumb a soul--but I will venture to say that for every soul that Mr.
Carnegie, or anyone else, has taken away, he has created, awakened and
stimulated a thousand by contact with that almost soul--that
near-soul--that resides in books. Mr. Lee's books may be merely paper;
mine have paper and ink only for their outer garb; their inner warp and
woof is of the texture of spirit.

This is why I rejoice when a new library is opened. I thank God for its
generous donor. I clasp hands with the far-reaching municipality that
accepts and supports it. I wish good luck to the librarians who are to
care for it and give it dynamic force; I congratulate the public whose
privilege it is to use it and to profit by it.




SIMON NEWCOMB: AMERICA'S FOREMOST ASTRONOMER


Among those in all parts of the world whose good opinion is worth having,
Simon Newcomb was one of the best known of America's great men.
Astronomer, mathematician, economist, novelist, he had well-nigh boxed the
compass of human knowledge, attaining eminence such as is given to few to
reach, at more than one of its points. His fame was of the far-reaching
kind,--penetrating to remote regions, while that of some others has only
created a noisy disturbance within a narrow radius.

Best and most widely known as an astronomer, his achievements in that
science were not suited for sensational exploitation. He discovered no
apple-orchards on the moon, neither did he dispute regarding the railways
on the planet Venus. His aim was to make still more exact our knowledge of
the motions of the bodies constituting what we call the solar system, and
his labors toward this end, begun more than thirty years ago, he continued
almost until the day of his death. Conscious that his span of life was
measured by months and in the grip of what he knew to be a fatal disease,
he yet exerted himself with all his remaining energy to complete his