concerted, united effort, the perfect union of which our flag is a symbol,
and which we need to-day even more than we did in 1776 or 1861.

We stand on the threshold of an effort to alter our city government.
Whether that effort should or should not succeed, every citizen must
decide for himself, with the aid of such intelligence and judgment as it
has pleased God to give him. But if he should decide in its favor, be
certain that his individual vote at the polls will go a very little way
toward bringing his desires to pass. We are governed by majorities, and a
majority is a union of many. He who would win must not only vote, but
work. Our flag, with its assemblages of stripes and stars, is a perpetual
reminder that by the union of the many, and not merely by the rectitude of
the individual, are policies altered and charters changed.

Again, our flag stands for love. It is a beautiful flag and it stands for
a beautiful land. We all love what is our own, if we are normal men and
women--our families, our city, our country. They are all beautiful to us,
and it is right that they should be.

I confess that the movement that has for its motto "See America First" has
my hearty sympathy. Not that the Rockies or the Sierras are necessarily
more beautiful than the Alps or the Missouri fairer than the Danube; we
should have no more to do here with comparisons than the man who loves his
children. He does not, before deciding that he will love them, compare
them critically with his neighbors'. If we do not love the Grand Canyon
and the Northern Rockies, the wild Sierras and the more peaceful beauties
of the Alleghenies or the Adirondacks, simply because leaving these all
unseen we prefer the lakes and mountains of foreign lands, we are like a
man who should desert his own children, whom he had never seen, to pass
his time at a moving-picture show, because he believed that he saw there
faces and forms more fair than those of his own little ones. When we sing
in our hymn of "America"

I love thy rocks and rills
Thy woods and templed hills,

we should be able to do it from the heart.

It is indeed fitting that we should love our country, and thrill when we
gaze at the old flag that symbolizes that love. Does this mean that when
our country makes an error we are to shut our eyes to it? Does it require
us to call wrong right and black white?

There is a sentiment with which you are all familiar, "My country, may she
ever be right; but, right or wrong, my country!"

Understood aright, these are the noblest and truest of words, but they are
commonly misinterpreted, and they have done much harm. To love and stand
by a friend who has done wrong is a fine thing; but it would be very
different to abet him in his wrong-doing and assure him that he had done
right. We may dearly love a son or a brother who is the worst of sinners,
without joining him in sin or persuading him that he is righteous.

So we may say, "Our country, right or wrong" without forfeiting the due
exercise of our judgment in deciding whether she is right or wrong, or the
privilege of exerting our utmost power to make her do right.

If she is fighting for an unrighteous cause, we should not go over to the
enemy, but we should do our best to make her cease and to make amends for
the wrong she has done.

Another thing for which the flag stands is freedom or liberty. We all are
familiar with the word. It means different things to different persons.
When hampering conditions press hard upon a man, all that he thinks of for
the moment is to be rid of them. Without them he deems that he will be
free. The freedom of which our fathers thought, for which they fought and
which they won, was freedom from government by what had become to them a
foreign power. The freedom that the black man longed for in the sixties
was freedom from slavery.

To-day men and women living in intolerable industrial conditions are
panting for freedom--the freedom that seems to them just now more
desirable than aught else in the world. All this the flag stands for, but
it stands for much more. Under its folds we are entitled to live our own
lives in the fullest way compatible with the exercise of the same
privilege by others. This includes political freedom, industrial freedom,
social freedom and all the rest. Despite much grumbling and some denials,
I believe that it is all summed up under political freedom, and that we
have it all, though we may not always take advantage of it. The people who
groan under an industrial yoke do so because they do not choose to exert
the power given them by law, under the flag, to throw it off. The
boss-ridden city is boss-ridden only because it is satisfied to be so. The
generation that is throttled by trusts and monopolies may at any time
effect a peaceful revolution. The flag gives us freedom, but even a man's
eternal salvation cannot be forced upon him against his will.

Another thing for which the flag stands is justice--the "square deal," as
it is called by one of our Presidents. To every man shall come sooner or
later, under its folds, that which he deserves. This means largely "hands
off," and is but one of the aspects of freedom, or liberty, since if we do
not interfere with a man, what happens to him is a consequence of what he
is and what he does. If we oppress him, or interfere with him, he gets
less than he merits; and if, on the contrary we coddle him and give him
privileges, he may get more than his due.

Give a man opportunity and a free path and he will achieve what is before
him in the measure of his strength. That the American Flag stands for all
this, thousands will testify who have left their native shores to live
under its folds and who have contributed here to the world's progress what
the restraints and injustice of the old world forbade then to give.

This sense of the removal of bonds, of sudden release and the entry into
free space, is well put by a poet of our own, Henry Van Dyke, when he
sings,

So it's home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back,
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free--
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Finally, the flag stands for the use of physical force where it becomes
necessary.

This simple statement of facts will grieve many good people, but to omit
it would be false to the truth and dishonorable to the flag that we honor
today.

Its origin, as we have seen, was in its service as a rallying point in
battle. We are still battling, and we still need it. And at times our
contests still inevitably take the physical form. One may earnestly pray
for peace; one may even pay his dues to the Peace Society and still
realize that to preserve peace we may have to use the sword.

Northward, across the Canadian border, good men[11] are striving even now
to keep us in peace and to assure peace to a neighbor severely torn by
internal conflict. Can any of us doubt that our good friend and
fellow-citizen--nay, can anyone doubt that our neighbors of the Southern
Continent--are doing their best to save human lives, to preserve our young
men and the young men of Mexico to build and operate machines, to raise
crops and to rebuild and beautify cities, instead of sending them to fill
soldiers' graves, as our bravest and best did in the "sixties?" And yet,
should they succeed, as God grant they may, who can doubt that what will
give strength and effect to their decisions will be the possibility of
force, exerted in a righteous cause, symbolized by the flag? Who can be
sorry that back of the flag there are earnest men; nay, that there are
ships there, and guns? One need not be a Jingo; one can hate war and love
peace with all one's heart and yet rejoice that the flag symbolizes
authority--the ability to back up a decision without which the mind itself
cannot decide in calmness and impartiality.

[11] United States and "A-B-C" Commissions on the State of Mexico.

Surely, to say that the flag stands for the exertion of force, is only to
say that it stands for peace; for it is by force only, or by the
possibility of it, that peace is assured and maintained.

These are a few of the many things for which our flag of the Stars and
Stripes stands. We are right to doff our hats when it passes; we are right
to love it and to reverence it, for in so doing we are reverencing union,
patriotism, liberty and justice. That it shall never become an empty
symbol; that it shall never wave over a land disunited, animated by hate,
shackled by indifference and feebleness, permeated by injustice, unable to
exert that salutary strength which alone can preserve peace without and
within--this is for us to see and for our children and grandchildren. We
must not only exercise that "eternal vigilance" of which the fathers
spoke, but we must be eternally ready, eternally active. The Star-Spangled
Banner! Long may it wave over a land whose sons and daughters are both
free and brave--free because they are brave, and brave because they are
free, and both because they are true children of that eternal father
without whom both freedom and bravery are but empty names.




THE PEOPLE'S SHARE IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY[12]

[12] Read before the Chicago Woman's Club. January 6, 1915.


The change that has come over the library in the last half century may be
described, briefly but comprehensively, by saying that it has become
predominantly a social institution; that is, that its primary concern is
now with the service that it may render to society--to the people. Books,
of course, were always intended to be read, and a library would have no
meaning were it never to be used; yet in the old libraries the collection
and preservation of the books was primary and their use secondary, whereas
the modern institution exists primarily for public service, the collection
of the books, their preservation, and whatever is done to them being
directed to this end. To a social institution--a family, a school, a club,
a church or a municipality--the persons constituting it, maintaining it,
or served by it are all-important. A family without parents and children,
a school without pupils, a club without members, a church with no
congregation, a city without citizens--all are unthinkable. We may better
realize the change in our conception of the public library by noting that
it has taken its place among bodies of this type. A modern library with no
readers is unthinkable; it is no library, as we now understand the word;
though it be teeming with books, housed in a palace, well cataloged and
properly manned.

It is no longer possible to question this view of the library as a social
institution--a means of rendering general service to the widest public. We
have to deal not with theories of what the library ought to be, but, with
facts indicating what it actually is; and we have only to look about us to
realize that the facts give the fullest measure of support to what I have
just said. The library is a great distributing agency, the commodities in
which it deals being ideas and its customers the citizens at large, who
pay, through the agency of taxation, for what they receive. This
democratic and civic view of the public library's functions, however, does
not commend itself to those who are not in sympathy with democratic
ideals. In a recent address, a representative librarian refers to it as
"the commercial traveler theory" of the library. The implication, of
course, is that it is an ignoble or unworthy theory. I have no objection
to accepting the phrase, for in my mind it has no such connotation. The
commercial traveler has done the world service which the library should
emulate rather than despise. He is the advance guard of civilization. To
speak but of our own country and of its recent years, he is responsible
for much of our improvement in transit facilities and hotel
accommodations. Personally, he is becoming more and more acceptable. The
best of our educated young men are going into commerce, and in commerce
to-day no one can reach the top of the ladder who has not proved his
efficiency "on the road." Would that we could place men of his type at the
head of all our libraries!

We need not think, however, that there is anything new in the method of
distribution by personal travel. Homer employed it when he wished his
heroic verse to reach the great body of his countrymen. By personal travel
he took it to the cross-roads--just as the distributor of food and
clothing and labor-saving appliances does to-day; just as we librarians
must do if we are to democratize all literature as Homer democratized a
small part of it. Homer, if you choose to say so, adopted the
"commercial-traveler theory" of literary distribution; but I prefer to say
that the modern public library, in laying stress on the necessity of
distributing its treasures and in adopting the measures that have proved
effective in other fields, is working on the Homeric method.

Now, without the people to whom he distributed his wares, Homer would have
been dead long ago. He lives because he took his wares to his audience.
And without its public, as we have already said, the public library, too,
would soon pass into oblivion. It must look to the public for the breath
of life, for the very blood in its veins, for its bone and sinew. What,
then, is the part that the community may play in increasing the efficiency
of a public institution like the public library? Such an institution is,
first of all, a medium through which the community does something for
itself. The community employs and supports it, and at the same time is
served by it. To use another homely illustration, which I am sure will not
please those who object to comparing great things with small, this type of
relationship is precisely what we find in domestic service. A cook or a
housemaid has a dual relation to the mistress of the house, who is at the
same time her employer and the person that she directly serves. This sort
of relation does not obtain, for instance, in the case of a railroad
employe, who is responsible to one set of persons and serves another. The
public library is established and maintained by a given community in order
that it may perform certain service for that same community directly. It
seems to me that this dual relationship ought to make for efficiency. If
it does not, it is because its existence and significance are not always
realized. The cook knows that if she does not cook to suit her mistress
she will lose her job--the thing works almost automatically. If the
railroad employe does not serve the public satisfactorily there is no such
immediate reaction, although I do not deny that the public displeasure may
ultimately reach the railroad authorities and through them the employe. In
most public institutions the reaction is necessarily somewhat indirect.
The post office is a public institution, but public opinion must act on it
generally through the channels of Congressional legislation, which takes
time. Owing to this fact, very few postmen, for instance, realize that the
persons to whom they deliver letters are also their employers. In all
libraries the machinery of reaction is not the same. In St. Louis, for
instance, the library receives the proceeds of a tax voted directly by the
people; in New York City it receives an appropriation voted by the Board
of Apportionment, whose members are elected by the people. The St. Louis
Public Library is therefore one step nearer the control of the people than
the New York Public Library. If we could imagine the management of either
library to become so objectionable as to make its abolition desirable, a
petition for a special election could remove public support in St. Louis
very soon. In New York the matter might have to become an issue in a
general election, at which members of a Board of Apportionment should be
elected under pledge to vote against the library's appropriation.
Nevertheless, in both cases there is ultimate popular control. Owing to
this dual relation, the public can promote the efficiency of the library
in two ways--by controlling it properly and by its attitude toward the
service that is rendered. Every member of the public, in fact, is related
to the library somewhat as a railway stockholder, riding on a train, is
related to the company. He is at once boss and beneficiary. Let us see
first what the public can do for its library through its relation of
control. Besides the purse-strings, which we have seen are sometimes held
directly by the public and sometimes by its elected representatives, we
must consider the governing board of the institution--its trustees or
directors. These may be elected by the people or appointed by an elected
officer, such as the mayor, or chosen by an elected body, such as the city
council or the board of education.

Let us take the purse-strings first. Does your public library get enough
public money to enable it to do the work that it ought to do? What is the
general impression about this in the community? What does the library
board think? What does the librarian think? What do the members of his
staff say? What has the library's annual report to say about it? It is not
at all a difficult matter for the citizen to get information on this
subject and to form his own opinion regarding it. Yet it is an unusual
thing to find a citizen who has either the information or a
well-considered opinion. The general impression always seems to be that
the library has plenty of money--rather more, in fact, than it can
legitimately use. It is probably well for the library, under these
circumstances, that the public control of its purse-strings is indirect.
If the citizens of an average American city had to go to the polls
annually and vote their public library an appropriation, I am sure that
most libraries would have to face a very material reduction of their
income.

The trouble about this impression is that it is gained without knowledge
of the facts. If a majority of the citizens, understanding how much work a
modern public library is expected to do and how their own library does it,
should deliberately conclude that its management was extravagant, and that
its expenditure should be cut down, the minority would have nothing to do,
as good citizens, but submit. The citizens have nothing to say as directly
as this, but the idea, so generally held, that libraries are well off,
does operate in the long run to limit library appropriations and to
prevent the library from doing much useful work that it might do and ought
to do.

It is then, every citizen's business, as I conceive it, to inform himself
or herself of the work that the public library is doing, of that which it
is leaving undone, and of the possibilities of increased appropriations.
If the result is a realization that the library appropriation is
inadequate, that realization should take the form of a statement that will
sooner or later reach the ears, and tend to stimulate the action, of those
directly responsible. And it should, above all, aid in the formation of a
sound public opinion. Ours is, we are told, a government of public
opinion. Such government will necessarily be good or bad as public opinion
is based on matured judgment or only on fleeting impressions.

Inadequacy of support is responsible for more library delinquency than the
average citizen imagines. Many a librarian is deservedly condemned for the
unsatisfactory condition of his institution when his fault is not, as his
detractors think, failure to see what should be done, or lack of ability
to do it, so much as inability to raise funds to do it with. This is
doubtless a fault, and its possessor should suffer, but how about the
equally guilty accessories? How about the city authorities who have failed
to vote the library adequate support? How about the board of trustees who
have accepted such a situation without protest? And what is more to our
purpose here, how about the citizens who have limited their efforts to
pointing out the cracks in the edifice, with not a bit of constructive
work in propping it up and making possible its restoration to strength and
soundness?

In conversation with a friend, not long ago, I referred to the financial
limitations of our library's work, and said that we could add to it
greatly and render more acceptable service if our income were larger. He
expressed great surprise, and said: "Why, I thought you had all the money
you want; your income must be all of $100,000 a year." Now, our income
actually is about $250,000, but how could I tell him that? I judiciously
changed the subject.

Let us look next, if you please, at the library board and examine some of
its functions. There appears to be much public misapprehension of the
duties of this body, and such misapprehension assumes various and opposing
forms. Some appear to think that the librarian is responsible for all that
is done in the library and that his board is a perfunctory body. Others
seem to believe that the board is the direct administrative head of the
library, in all of its working details and that the librarian is its
executive in the limited sense of doing only those things that he is told
to do. Unfortunately there are libraries that are operated in each of
these ways, but neither one relationship nor the other, nor any
modification of either, is the ideal one between a librarian and his
board. The board is supreme, of course, but it is a body of non-experts
who have employed an expert to bring about certain results. They ought to
know what they want, and what they have a right to expect, and if their
expert does not give them this, the relation between him and them should
terminate; but if they are men of sense they will not attempt to dictate
methods or supervise details. They are the delegated representatives of
the great public, which owns the library and operates it for a definite
purpose. It is this function of the board as the representative of the
public that should be emphasized here. Has the public a definite idea of
what it wants from the public library, and of what is reasonable for it to
ask? If so, is it satisfied that it is represented by a board that is of
the same mind? The citizens may be assured that the composition of the
library board rests ultimately upon its will. If the board is elective,
this is obvious; if appointive, the appointing officer or body would
hardly dare to go counter to the expressed desire of the citizens.

What has been said above may be put into a very few words. The public
library is public property, owned and controlled by the citizens. Every
citizen, therefore, should be interested in setting standards for it and
playing his part toward making it conform to them--in seeing that its
governing body represents him in also recognizing those standards and
trying to maintain them--in laboring for such a due apportionment of the
public funds as shall not make an attempt to live up to such standards a
mere farce.

So much for the things that the citizen can and should do in his capacity
of library boss. His possibilities as a beneficiary are still more
interesting and valuable.

Perhaps you remember the story of the man who attempted to board the
warship and, on being asked his business, replied, "I'm one of the
owners." One version of the tale then goes on to relate how the sailor
thus addressed picked up a splinter from the deck, and, handing it to the
visitor, remarked: "Well, I guess that's about your share. Take it and get
out!"

I have always sympathized with the sailor rather than with his visitor.
Most of us librarians have had experiences with these bumptious "owners"
of public property. The fact has already been noted that in a case like
this the citizen is both an owner and a beneficiary. He has duties and
privileges in both capacities, but he sometimes acts the owner in the
wrong place. The man on the warship was doubtless an owner, but at that
particular moment he was only a visitor, subject to whatever rules might
govern visitors; and he should have acted as such. Every citizen is a part
owner of the public library; he should never forget that fact. We have
seen how he may effectively assert his ownership and control. But when he
enters the library to use it his role is that of beneficiary, and he
should act as such. He may so act and at the same time be of the greatest
service to the institution which he, as a member of the public, has
created and is maintaining.

I know of no way in which a man may show his good citizenship or the
reverse--may either demonstrate his ability and willingness to live and
work in community harness, or show that he is fit for nothing but
individual wild life in the woods--better than in his use of such a public
institution as a library. The man who cannot see that what he gets from
such an institution must necessarily be obtained at the price of
sacrifice--that others in the community are also entitled to their share,
and that sharing always means yielding--that man has not yet learned the
first lesson in the elements of civic virtue. And when one sees a thousand
citizens, each of whom would surely raise his voice in protest if the
library were to waste public money by buying a thousand copies of the
latest novel, yet find fault with the library because each cannot borrow
it before all the others, one is tempted to wonder whether we really have
here a thousand bad citizens or whether their early education in
elementary arithmetic has been neglected.

Before the present era there were regulations in all institutions that
seemed to be framed merely to exasperate--to put the public in its place
and chasten its spirit. There are now no such rules in good libraries. He
who thinks there are may find that there is a difference of opinion
between him and those whom he has set in charge of the library regarding
what is arbitrary and what is necessary; but at any rate he will discover
that the animating spirit of modern library authority is to give all an
equal share in what it has to offer, and to restrain one man no more than
is necessary to insure to his brother the measure of privilege to which
all are equally entitled.

Another way in which the citizen, in his capacity of the library's
beneficiary, can aid it and improve its service is his treatment of its
administrators. Librarians are very human: they react quickly and surely
to praise or blame, deserved or undeserved. Blame is what they chiefly
get. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes not. But the occasions on
which some citizen steps in and says, "Well done, good and faithful
servant," are rare indeed. The public servant has to interpret silence as
praise; so sure is he that the least slip will be caught and condemned by
a vigilant public. No one can object to discriminating criticism; it is a
potent aid to good administration. Mere petulant fault-finding, however,
especially if based on ignorance or misapprehension, does positive harm.
And a little discriminating praise, now and then, is a wonderful
stimulant. No service is possible without the men and women who render it;
and the quality of service depends, more than we often realize, on the
spirit and temper of a staff--something that is powerfully affected,
either for good or for evil, by public action and public response.

Years ago, at a branch library in a distant city, a reader stood at the
counter and complained loudly because the library would not send her a
postal reserve notice unless she defrayed the cost, which was one cent.
The assistant to whom she was talking had no option in the matter and was
merely enforcing a rule common, so far as I know, to all American public
libraries; but she had to bear the brunt of the reader's displeasure,
which she did meekly, as it was all in the day's work. The time occupied
in this useless business spelled delay to half a dozen other readers, who
were waiting their turn. Finally, one of them, a quiet little old lady in
black, spoke up as follows: "Some of us hereabouts think that we owe a
great debt of gratitude to this library. Its assistants have rendered
service to us that we can never repay. I am glad to have an opportunity to
do something in return, and it therefore gives me pleasure to pay the cent
about which you are taking up this young lady's time, and ours." So
saying, she laid the coin on the desk and the line moved on. I have always
remembered these two points of view as typical of two kinds of library
users. Their respective effects on the temper and work of a library staff
need, I am sure, no explanation.

In what I have said, which is such a small fraction of what might be said,
that I am almost ashamed to offer it to you, I have in truth only been
playing the variations on one tune, which is--Draw closer to the library,
as it is trying to draw closer to you. There is no such thing, physicists
tell us, as a one-sided force. Every force is but one aspect of a stress,
which includes also an equal and opposing force. Any two interacting
things in this world are either approaching each other or receding from
each other. So it should be with library and public. A forward movement on
the one hand should necessarily involve one to meet it.

The peculiarity of our modern temper is our hunger for facts--our
confidence that when the facts are known we shall find a way to deal with
them, and that until the facts are known we shall not be able to act--not
even to think. Our ancestors thought and acted sometimes on premises that
seem to us frightfully flimsy--they tried, as Dean Swift painted them in
his immortal satire, to get sunbeams from cucumbers. There are some
sunbeam-chasers among us to-day, but even they recognize the need of real
cucumbers to start with; the imaginary kind will not do. I recently heard
a great teacher of medicine say that the task of the modern physician is
merely to ascertain the facts on which the intelligent public is to act.
How different that sounds from the dicta of the medicine of a past
generation! It is the same everywhere: we are demanding an accurate
survey--an ascertainment of the facts in any field in which action, based
on inference and judgment, is seen to be necessary. Now the library is
nothing more nor less than a storehouse of recorded facts. It is becoming
so more truly and more fully every day, thereby adjusting itself to the
modern temper of which I have already spoken. The library and its users
are coming more closely together, in sympathy, in aims and in action, than
ever before--partly a result and partly a justification for that Homeric
method of popularizing it which has been characterized and condemned as
commercial. The day when the librarian, or the professor, or the clergyman
could retire into his tower and hold aloof from the vulgar herd is past.
The logical result of such an attitude is now being worked out on the
continent of Europe. Not civilizations, as some pessimists are lamenting,
but the forces antagonistic to civilization are there destroying one
another, and there is hope that a purified democracy will arise from the
wreckage. May our American civilization never have to run the gantlet of
such a terrible trial! Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the hope for
the future efficiency of all our public institutions, including the
library, lies in the success of democracy, and that depends on the
existence and improvement of the conditions in whose absence democracy
necessarily fails. Foremost among these is the homogeneity of the
population. The people among whom democracy succeeds must have similar
standards, ideas, aims and abilities. Democracy may exist in a pack of
wolves, but not in a group that is half wolves and half men. Either the
wolves will kill the men or the men the wolves. This is an extreme case,
but it is true in general that in a community made up of irreconcilable
elements there can be no true democracy. And the same oneness of vision
and purpose that conduces to the success of democracy will also bring to
perfection such great democratic institutions as the library, which have
already borne such noteworthy fruit among us just because we are
homogeneous beyond all other nations on the earth. And here progress is by
action and reaction, as we see it so often in the world. The unity of aims
and abilities that makes democracy and democratic institutions possible is
itself facilitated and increased by the work of those institutions. The
more work the library does, the more its ramifications multiply, and the
further they extend, the more those conditions are favored that make the
continuance of the library possible. In working for others, it is working
for itself, and every additional bit of strength and sanity that it takes
on does but enable it to work for others the more. And if the democracy
whose servant it is will but realize that it has grown up as a part of
that American system to which we are all committed--to which we owe all
that we are and in which we must place all our hopes for the future--then
neither democracy nor library will have aught to fear. Democracy will have
its "true and laudable" service from the library, and the library in its
turn will have adequate sympathy, aid and support from the people.

It is no accident that I make this appeal for sympathy and aid to a club
composed of women. The bonds between the modern public library and the
modern woman's club have been particularly strong in this country. The two
institutions have grown up together, making their way against suspicion,
contempt and hostility, aided by the same public demand, and now, when
both are recognized as elements in the intellectual strength of our
nation, they are rendering mutual service. The club turns to the library
daily. Hitherto the library has turned to the club only in some
emergency--a bill to be passed, an appropriation to be made, an
administration to be purified. I have tried to show you how, apart from
these great services, which no one would think of minimizing, the women of
this country, as citizens, can uphold the hands of the library daily. Ours
is a government of public opinion, and in the formation of that opinion
there is no more powerful element than the sentiment of our women,
especially when organized in such bodies as yours.

"To be aristocratic in taste and democratic in service," says Bliss Perry,
"is the privilege and glory of the public library." In appealing thus to
both your aristocracy and your democracy, I feel, then, that I have not
gone astray.




SOME TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN THOUGHT[13]

[13] Read before the New York Library Association at Squirrel Inn,
Haines Falls, September 28, 1915.


The modern American mind, like modern America, itself, is a melting pot.
We are taking men and women of all races and fusing them into Americans.
In the same way we are taking points of view, ideas, standards and modes
of action from whatever source we find them, combining them and fusing
them into what will one day become American thoughts and standards. We are
thus combining the most varied and opposing things--things that it would
seem impossible to put together. Take our modern American tendency in
government, for instance. Could there be two things more radically
different than despotism and democracy?--the rule of the one and the rule
of the many? And yet I believe that we are taking steps toward a very
successful combination of the two. Such a combination is essentially
ancient. No despotism can hold its own without the consent of the
governed. That consent may be unwilling and sooner or later it is then
withheld, with the result that a revolution takes place and the despot
loses his throne--the oldest form of the recall. Every despotism is thus
tempered by revolution, and Anglo-Saxon communities have been ready to
exercise such a privilege on the slightest sign that a despotic tendency
was creeping into their government.

It is not remarkable, then, that our own Federal government, which is
essentially a copy of the British government of its day, should have
incorporated this feature of the recall, which in England had just passed
from its revolutionary to its legal stage. It was beginning to be
recognized then that a vote of the people's representatives could recall a
monarch, and the English monarchy is now essentially elective. But to make
assurance doubly sure, the British government, in its later evolution, has
been practically separated from the monarch's person, and any government
may be simply overthrown or "recalled" by a vote of lack of confidence in
the House of Commons, followed, if need be, by a defeat in a general
election. We have not yet adopted this feature. Our President is still the
head of our government, and he and all other elected Federal officers
serve their terms out, no matter whether the people have confidence in
them or not. But the makers of our Constitution improved on the British
government as they found it. They made the term of the executive four
years instead of life and systematized the "recall" by providing for
impeachment proceedings--a plan already recognized in Britain in the case
of certain administrative and judicial officers.

As it stands at present we have a temporary elective monarch with more
power, even nominally, than most European constitutional monarchs and more
actually than many so-called absolute monarchs such as the Czar or the
Sultan. In case he should abuse the power that we have given him, he may
be removed from office after due trial, by our elected representatives.

In following out these ideas in later years, we are gradually evolving a
form of government that is both more despotic and more democratic. We are
combining the legislative and executive power in the hands of a few
persons, hampering them very little in their exercise of it, and making it
possible to recall them by direct vote of the body of citizens that
elected them. I think we may describe the tendency of public thought in
governmental matters as a tendency toward a despotism under legalized
democratic control. It may be claimed, I think, that the best features of
despotism and democracy may thus be utilized, with a minimum of the evils
of each.

It was believed by the ancients, and we frequently see it stated today,
that the ideal government would he government by a perfectly good despot.
This takes the citizens into account only as persons who are governed, and
not as persons who govern or help to govern. It is pleasant, perhaps, to
have plenty of servants to wait upon one, but surely health, physical,
mental and moral, waits on him who does most things for himself. I once
heard Lincoln Steffens say: "What we want is not 'Good Government'; it is
_Self_-Government." But is it not possible to get the advantage of
government by a few, with its possibilities of continuous policy and its
freedom from "crowd-psychology," with its skillful utilization of expert
knowledge, while admitting the public to full knowledge of what is going
on, and full ultimate control of it? We evidently think so, and our present
tendencies are evidence that we are attempting something of the kind. Our
belief seems to be that if we elect our despot and are able to recall him
we shall have to keep tab on him pretty closely, and that the knowledge of
statecraft that will thus be necessary to us will be no less than if we
personally took part in legislation and administration--probably far more
than if we simply went through the form of delegating our responsibilities
and then took no further thought, as most of us have been accustomed to do.

Whether this is the right view or not--whether it is workable--the future
will show; I am here discussing tendencies, not their ultimate outcome.
But it would be too much to expect that this or any other eclectic policy
should be pleasing to all.

"The real problem of collectivism," says Walter Lippmann, "is the
difficulty of combining popular control with administrative power.... The
conflict between democracy and centralized authority ... is the line upon
which the problems of collectivism will be fought out."

In selecting elements from both despotism and democracy we are displeasing
the adherents of both. There is too much despotism in the plan for one
side and too much democracy for the other. We constantly hear the
complaint that concentrated responsibility with popular control is too
despotic, and at the same time the criticism that it is too democratic. To
put your city in the hands of a small commission, perhaps of a city
manager, seems to some to be a return to monarchy; and so perhaps it is.
To give Tom, Dick and Harry the power to unseat these monarchs at will is
said to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is. Only it is
possible that by combining these two poisons--this acid and this
alkali--in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities. At
any rate this would seem to be the idea on which we are now proceeding.

We may now examine the effects of this tendency toward eclecticism in
quite a different field--that of morals. Among the settlers of our country
were both Puritans and Cavaliers--representatives in England of two moral
standards that have contended there for centuries and still exist there
side by side. We in America are attempting to mix them with some measure
of success. This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tells
in his "American Commonwealth," who said that American women were
"_furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm_"--frightfully free and frightfully
pious! In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritan
standards. Of course those who do not understand what is going on think
that we are either too free or too pious. We are neither; we are trying to
give and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiency
and restraint where restraint is indicated. We have not arrived at a final
standard. We may not do so. This effort at mixture, like all our others,
may fail; but there appears to be no doubt that we are making it. To take
an obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, to
combine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity of
marriage. We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble,
there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than if
there are legal ways of dissolving it.

Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinary
conversation to infractions of the moral code that they treat as trivial.
They on the other hand are shocked when we talk of divorce for what they
consider insufficient causes. In the former case we seem to them
"frightfully pious"; in the latter, "frightfully free." They are right; we
are both; it is only another instance of our tendency towards eclecticism,
this time in moral standards.

In some directions we find that this tendency to eclecticism is working
toward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundred
different ones. Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in our
architecture. A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico,
has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any more
than he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird's nest for a
woodchuck hole.

But in an American city, especially where we have enough money to let our
architects do their utmost, we find streets where France, England, Italy,
Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the
European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to
his nerve-specialist. It seems all right to us, and it _is_ all right from
the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism. And
our other art--painting, sculpture, music--it is all similarly mixed. Good
of its kind, often; but we have not yet settled down to the kind that we
like best--the kind in which we are best fitted to do something that will
live through the ages.

We used to think for instance that in music the ordinary diatonic major
scale, with its variant minor, was a fact of nature. We knew vaguely that
the ancient Greeks had other scales, and we knew also that the Chinese and
the Arabs had scales so different that their music was generally
displeasing to us. But we explained this by saying that our scale was
natural and right and that the others were antiquated, barbaric and wrong.
Now we are opening our arms to the exotic scales and devising a few of our
own. We have the tonal and the semi-tonal scales and we are trying to make
use of the Chinese, Arabic and Hindu modes. We are producing results that