sound very odd to ears that are attuned to the old-fashioned music, but
our eclecticism here as elsewhere is cracking the shell of prejudice and
will doubtless lead to some good end, though perhaps we can not see it
yet.

How about education? In the first place there are, as I read the history
of education, two main methods of training youth--the individual method
and the class method. No two boys or girls are alike; no two have like
reactions to the same stimulus. Each ought to have a separate teacher, for
the methods to be employed must be adapted especially to the material on
which we have to work. This means a separate tutor for every child.

On the other hand, the training that we give must be social--must prepare
for life with and among one's fellow beings, otherwise it is worthless.
This means training in class, with and among other students, where each
mind responds not to the teacher's alone but to those of its fellow
pupils.

Here are two irreconcilable requirements. In our modern systems of
education we are trying to respond to them as best we may, teaching in
class and at the same time giving each pupil as much personal attention as
we can. The tutorial system, now employed in Princeton University, is an
interesting example of our efforts as applied to the higher education.

At the same time, eclecticism in our choice of subjects is very manifest,
and at times our success here seems as doubtful as our mixture of
architectural styles. In the old college days, not so very long ago,
Latin, Greek, and mathematics made up the curriculum. Now our boys choose
from a thousand subjects grouped in a hundred courses. In our common
schools we have introduced so many new subjects as to crowd the
curriculum. Signs of a reaction are evident. I am alluding to the matter
here only as another example of our modern passion for wide selection and
for the combination of things that apparently defy amalgamation.

What of religion? Prof. George E. Woodberry, in his interesting book on
North Africa, says in substance that there are only two kinds of religion,
the simple and the complex. Mohammedanism he considers a simple religion,
like New England Puritanism, with which he thinks it has points in common.
Both are very different from Buddhism, for instance. Accepting for the
moment his classification I believe that the facts show an effort to
combine the two types in the United States. Many of the Christian
denominations that Woodberry would class as "simple"--those that began
with a total absence of ritual, are becoming ritualized. Creeds once
simple are becoming complicated with interpretation and comment. On the
other hand we may see in the Roman Catholic Church and among the so-called
"High Church" Episcopalians a disposition to adopt some of the methods
that have hitherto distinguished other religious bodies. Consider, for
example, some of the religious meetings held by the Paulist Fathers in New
York, characterized by popular addresses and the singing of simple hymns.
As another example of the eclectic spirit of churches in America we may
point to the various efforts at combination or unity, with such results as
the Federation of the Churches of Christ in America--an ambitious name,
not yet justified by the facts--the proposed amalgamation of several of
the most powerful Protestant bodies in Canada, and the accomplished fact
of the University of Toronto--an institution whose constituent colleges
are controlled by different religious denominations, including the Roman
Catholic Church. I may also mention the present organization of the New
York Public Library, many of whose branch libraries were contributions
from religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and the
Episcopalians. All these now work together harmoniously. I know of nothing
of this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified in
crediting it to the present American tendency to eclecticism.

Turn for a moment to philosophy. What is the philosophical system most
widely known at present as American? Doubtless the pragmatism of William
James. No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regarding
philosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; but
pragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system. It is based on the
character of results. Is something true or false? I will tell you when I
find out whether it works practically or not. Is something right or wrong?
I rely on the same test. Now it seems to me that this is the scheme of the
peasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Juno
or Egyptian Isis or Phoenician Moloch, so long as he got what he wanted.
If a little bit of Schopenhauer works, and some of Fichte; a piece of
Christianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill of
pragmatism. Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true. I am
not criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely asserting
that it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue in
the United States.

It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a list
of all the domains in which this eclecticism--this tendency to select,
combine and blend--has cropped out among us Americans of today. I have
reserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested--the
Public Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree.
The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a
wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any
other part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users look
at us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under
the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our
extravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are
compelled to foot the bills for what we do. But the taxpayers do not seem
to mind. They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing. What
bothers them is that we do not try to do more. When we began timidly to
add branch libraries to our system they asked us why we did not build and
equip them faster; when we placed a few books on open shelves they
demanded that we treat our whole stock in the same way; when we set aside
a corner for the children they forced us to fit up a whole room and to
place such a room in every building, large or small. We have responded to
every such demand. Each response has cost money and the public has paid
the bill. Apparently librarians and public are equally satisfied. We
should not be astonished, for this merely shows that the library is
subject to the same laws and tendencies as all other things American.

Hence it comes about that whereas in a large library a century ago there
were simply stored books with no appliances to do anything but keep them
safe, we now find in library buildings all sorts of devices to facilitate
the quick and efficient use of the books both in the building and in the
readers' homes, together with other devices to stimulate a desire to use
books among those who have not yet felt it; to train children to use and
love books; to interest the public in things that will lead to the use of
books. This means that many of the things in a modern library seem to an
old-fashioned librarian and an old-fashioned reader like unwarranted
extensions or even usurpations. In our own Central building you will find
collections of postal cards and specimens of textile fabrics, an index to
current lectures, exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room, with
free note-paper and envelopes, a class of young women studying to be
librarians, meeting places for all sorts of clubs and groups, civic,
educational, social, political and religious; a bindery in full operation,
a photographic copying-machine; lunch-rooms and rest-rooms for the staff;
a garage, with an automobile in it, a telephone switchboard, a paintshop,
a carpenter-shop, and a power-plant of considerable capacity. Not one of
these things I believe, would you have found in a large library fifty
years ago. And yet the citizens of St. Louis seem to be cheerful and are
not worrying over the future. We are eclectic, but we are choosing the
elements of our blend with some discretion and we have been able, so far,
to relate them all to books, to the mental activities that are stimulated
by books and that produce more books, to the training that instils into
the rising generation a love for books. The book is still at the
foundation of the library, even if its walls have received some
architectural embellishment of a different type.

When anyone objects to the introduction into the library of what the
colleges call "extra-curriculum activities," I prefer to explain and
justify it in this larger way, rather than to take up each activity by
itself and discuss its reasonableness--though this also may be undertaken
with the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the
United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own
being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You
can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply
drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit
to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so
doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but fatigue, or
he may use the force of the stream, as far as he may, to reach his own
goal. I like to think that this is what many American institutions are
doing, our libraries among them. They are using the present tendency to
eclecticism in an effort toward wider public service. When, in a
community, there seems to be a need for doing some particular thing, the
library, if it has the equipment and the means, is doing that thing
without inquiring too closely whether there is logical justification for
linking it with the library's activities rather than with some others.
Note, now, how this desirable result is aided by our prevailing American
tendency toward eclecticism. Suppose precisely the same conditions to
obtain in England, or France, or Italy, the admitted need for some
activity, the ability of the library and the inability of any other
institution, to undertake it. I submit that the library would be extremely
unlikely to move in the matter, simply from the lack of the tendency that
we are discussing. That tendency gives a flexibility, almost a fluidity,
which under a pressure of this kind, yields and ensures an outlet for
desirable energy along a line of least resistance.

The Englishman and the American, when they are arguing a case of this
kind, assume each the condition of affairs that obtains in his own
land--the rigidity on the one hand, the fluidity on the other. They assume
it without stating it or even thoroughly understanding it, and the result
is that neither can understand the conclusions of the other. The fact is
that they are both right. I seriously question whether it would be right
or proper for a library in a British community to do many of the things
that libraries are doing in American communities. I may go further and say
that the rigidity of British social life would make it impossible for the
library to achieve these things. But it is also true that the fluidity of
American social life makes it equally impossible for the library to
withstand the pressure that is brought to bear on it here. To yield is in
its case right and proper and a failure of response would be wrong and
improper.

It is usually assumed by the British critic of American libraries that
their peculiarities are due to the temperament of the American librarian.
We make a similar assumption when we discuss British libraries. I do not
deny that the librarians on both sides have had something to do with it,
but the determining factor has been the social and temperamental
differences between the two peoples. Americans are fluid, experimental,
eclectic, and this finds expression in the character of their institutions
and in the way these are administered and used.

Take if you please the reaction of the library on the two sides of the
water to the inevitable result of opening it to home-circulation--the
necessity of knowing whether a given book is or is not on the shelves. The
American response was to open the shelves, the British, to create an
additional piece of machinery--the indicator. These two results might have
been predicted in advance by one familiar with the temper of the two
peoples. It has shown itself in scores of instances, in the front yards of
residences, for instance--walled off in England and open to the street in
the United States.

I shall be reminded, I suppose, that there are plenty of open shelves in
English libraries and that the open shelf is gaining in favor. True;
England is becoming "Americanized" in more respects than this one. But I
am speaking of the immediate reaction to the stimulus of popular demand,
and this was as I have stated it. In each case the reaction, temporarily
at least, satisfied the demand; showing that the difference was not of
administrative habit alone, but of community feeling.

This rapid review of modern American tendencies, however confusing the
impression that it may give, will at any rate convince us, I think, of one
thing--the absurdity of objecting to anything whatever on the ground that
it is un-American. We are the most receptive people in the world. We "take
our good things where we find them," and what we take becomes "American"
as soon as it gets into our hands. And yet, if anything new does not
happen to suit any of us, the favorite method of attack is to denounce it
as "un-American." Pretty nearly every element of our present social fabric
has been thus denounced, at one time or another, and as it goes on
changing, every change is similarly attacked.

The makers of our Constitution were good conservative Americans--much too
conservative, some of our modern radicals say--yet they provided for
altering that Constitution, and set absolutely no limits on the
alterations that might be made, provided that they were made in the manner
specified in the instrument. We can make over our government into a
monarchy tomorrow, if we want, or decree that no one in Chicago shall wear
a silk hat on New Year's Day. It was recently the fashion to complain that
the amendment of the Constitution has become so difficult as to be now
practically a dead letter. And yet we have done so radical a thing as to
change absolutely the method of electing senators of the United States;
and we did it as easily and quietly as buying a hat--vastly more easily
than changing a cook. The only obstacle to changing our Constitution, no
matter how radically and fundamentally, is the opposition of the people
themselves. As soon as they want the change, it comes quickly and simply.
Changes like these are not un-American if the American people like them
well enough to make them. They, and they alone, are the judges of what
peculiarities they shall adopt as their own customs and characteristics.
So that when we hear that this or that is un-American, we may agree only
in so far as it is not yet an American characteristic. That we do not care
for it today is no sign that we may not take up with it tomorrow, and it
is no legitimate argument against our doing so, if we think proper.

And now what does this all mean? The pessimist will tell us, doubtless,
that it is a sign of decadence. It does remind us a little of the later
days of the Roman empire when the peoples of the remotest parts of the
known world, with their arts, customs and manners, were all to be found in
the imperial city--when the gods of Greece, Syria and Egypt were
worshipped side by side with those of old Rome, where all sorts of exotic
art, philosophy, literature and politics took root and flourished. That is
usually regarded as a period of decadence, and it was certainly a
precursor of the empire's fall. When we consider that it was
contemporaneous with great material prosperity and with the spread of
luxury and a certain loosening of the moral fiber, such as we are
experiencing in America today, we can not help feeling a little perturbed.
Yet there is another way of looking at it. A period of this sort is often
only a period of readjustment. The Roman empire as a political entity went
out of existence long ago, but Rome's influence on our art, law,
literature and government is still powerful. Her so-called "fall" was
really not a fall but a changing into something else. In fact, if we take
Bergson's view-point--which it seems to me is undoubtedly the true one,
the thing we call Rome was never anything else but a process of change. At
the time of which we speak the visible part of the change was
accelerated--that is all. In like manner each one of you as an individual
is not a fixed entity. You are changing every instant and the reality
about you is the change, not what you see with the eye or photograph with
the camera--that is merely a stage through which you pass and in which you
do not stay--not for the thousand millionth part of the smallest
recognizable instant. So our current American life and thought is not
something that stands still long enough for us to describe it. Even as we
write the description it has changed to another phase. And the phenomena
of transition just now are particularly noticeable--that is all. We may
call them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new and
more glorious national life.

"The size and intricacy which we have to deal with," says Walter Lippmann,
"have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple
generalizations of our ancestors."

This is quite true, and so, in place of simplicity we are introducing
complexity, very largely by selection and combination of simple elements
evolved in former times to fit earlier conditions. Whether organic
relations can be established among these elements, so that there shall one
day issue from the welter something well-rounded, something American,
fitting American conditions and leading American aspirations forward and
upward, is yet on the knees of the gods. We, the men and women of America,
and may I not say, we, the Librarians of America, can do much to direct
the issue.




DRUGS AND THE MAN[14]

[14] A Commencement address to the graduating class of the School
of Pharmacy, St. Louis, May 19, 1915.


The graduation of a class of technically trained persons is an event of
special moment. When we send forth graduates from our schools and colleges
devoted to general education, while the thought of failure may be
disquieting or embarrassing, we know that no special danger can result,
except to the man who has failed. The college graduate who has neglected
his opportunities has thrown away a chance, but he is no menace to his
fellows. Affairs take on a different complexion in the technical or
professional school. The poorly trained engineer, physician or lawyer, is
an injury to the community. Failure to train an engineer may involve the
future failure of a structure, with the loss of many lives. Failure to
train a doctor means that we turn loose on the public one who will kill
oftener than he will cure. Failure to train a lawyer means wills that can
be broken, contracts that will not hold, needless litigation.

Congressman Kent, of California, has coined a satisfactory word for this
sort of thing--he calls it "mal-employment." Unemployment is a bad thing.
We have seen plenty of it here during the past winter. But Kent says, and
he is right, that malemployment is a worse thing. All these poor engineers
and doctors and lawyers are busily engaged, and every thing on the surface
seems to be going on well. But as a matter of fact, the world would be
better off if each one of them should stop working and never do another
stroke. It would pay the community to support them in idleness.

I have always considered pharmacy to be one of the occupations in which
malemployment is particularly objectionable. If you read Homer badly it
affects no one but yourself. If you think Vera Cruz is in Italy and that
the Amazon River runs into the Arctic Ocean, your neighbor is as well off
as before; but if you are under the impression that strychnine is aspirin,
you have failed in a way that is more than personal.

I am dwelling on these unpleasant possibilities partly for the reason that
the Egyptians displayed a skeleton at their banquets--because warnings are
a tonic to the soul--but also because, if we are to credit much that we
see in general literature, including especially the daily paper and the
popular magazine, _all_ druggists are malemployed. And if it would really
be better for the community that you should not enter upon the profession
for which you have been trained, now, of course, is the time for you to
know it.

There seems to be a widespread impression--an assumption--that the day of
the drug is over--that the therapeutic of the future are to be concerned
along with hygiene and sanitation, with physical exercise, diet, and
mechanical operations. The very word "drug" has come to have an
objectionable connection that did not belong to it fifty years ago. Even
some of the druggists themselves, it seems to me, are a little ashamed of
the drug part of their occupation. Their places of business appear to be
news-agencies, refreshment parlors, stationery stores--the drugs are "on
the side," or rather in the rear. Sometimes, I am told, the proprietors of
these places know nothing at all about pharmacy, but employ a prescription
clerk who is a capable pharmacist. Here the druggist has stepped down from
his former position as the manager of a business and has become a servant.
All of which looks to me as if the pharmacist himself might be beginning
to accept the valuation that some people are putting upon his services to
the community.

Now these things affect me, not as a physician nor as a pharmacist, for I
am neither, but they do touch me as a student of physics and chemistry and
as one whose business and pleasure it has been for many years to watch the
development of these and other sciences. The fact that I am addressing you
this evening may be taken, I suppose, as evidence that you may be
interested in this point of view. The action of most substances on the
human organism is a function of their chemical constitution. Has that
chemical constitution changed? It is one of the most astonishing
discoveries of our age that many, perhaps all, substances undergo
spontaneous disintegration, giving rise to the phenomena now well known as
"radio-activity." No substances ordinarily known and used in pharmacy,
however, possess this quality in measurable degree, and we have no reason
to suppose that the alkaloids, for instance, or the salts of potash or
iron, differ today in any respect from those of a century ago. How about
the other factor in the reaction--the human organism and its properties?
That our bodily properties have changed in the past admits of no doubt. We
have developed up to the point where we are at present. Here, however,
evolution seems to have left us, and it is now devoting its attention
exclusively to our mental and moral progress. Judging from what is now
going on upon the continent of Europe, much remains to be accomplished.
But there is no reason to believe that if Caesar or Hannibal had taken a
dose of opium, or ipecac, or aspirin, the effect would have been different
from that experienced today by one of you. This is what a physicist or a
chemist would expect. If the action of a drug on the organism is chemical,
and if neither the drug nor the organism has changed, the action must be
the same. If we still desire to bring about the action and if there is no
better way to do it, we must use the drug, and there is still need for the
druggist. As a matter of fact, the number of drugs at your disposal today
is vastly greater than ever before, largely owing to the labor, and the
ingenuity, of the analytical chemist. And there are still great classes of
compounds of whose existence the chemist is assured, but which he has not
even had time to form, much less to investigate. Among these may lurk
remedies more valuable than any at our disposal today. It does not look,
at any rate, as if the druggist were going to be driven out of business
from lack of stock, whether we regard quantity or variety. To what, then,
must we attribute the growth of the feeling that the treatment of disease
by the administration of drugs is on the decline? From the standpoint of a
layman it seems to be due to two facts, or at least to have been strongly
affected by them: (1) The discovery and rapid development of other
therapeutic measures, such as those dependent on surgical methods, or on
the use of immunizing serums, or on manipulations such as massage, or on
diet, or even on mental suggestion; and (2) the very increase in the
number and variety of available drugs alluded to above, which has
introduced to the public many new and only partially tried substances, the
results of whose use has often been unexpectedly injurious, including a
considerable number of new habit-forming drugs whose ravages are becoming
known to the public.

The development of therapeutic measures that are independent of drugs has
been coincident with popular emancipation from the mere superstition of
drug-administration. The older lists of approved remedies were loaded with
items that had no curative properties at all, except by suggestion. They
were purely magical--the thumb-nails of executed criminals, the hair of
black cats, the ashes of burned toads and so on. Even at this moment your
pharmacopoeia contains scores of remedies that are without effect or that
do not produce the effects credited to them. I am relying on high
therapeutical authority for this statement. Now when the sick man is told
by his own physician to discard angleworm poultices, and herbs plucked in
the dark of the moon, on which he had formerly relied, it is any wonder
that he has ended by being suspicious also of calomel and ipecac, with
which they were formerly classed? And when the man who believed that he
received benefit from some of these magical remedies is told that the
result was due to auto-suggestion, is it remarkable that he should fall an
easy prey next day to the Christian Scientist who tells him that the
effects of calomel and ipecac are due to nothing else than this same
suggestion? The increased use and undoubted value of special diets,
serums, aseptic surgery, baths, massage, electrical treatment,
radio-therapeutics, and so on, makes it easy for him to discard drugs
altogether, and further, it creates, even among those who continue to use
drugs, an atmosphere favorable to the belief that they are back numbers,
on the road to disuse. Just here comes in the second factor to persuade
the layman, from what has come under his own observation, that drugs are
injurious, dangerous, even fatal. Newly discovered chemical compounds with
valuable properties, have been adopted and used in medicine before the
necessary time had elapsed to disclose the fact that they possessed also
other properties, more elusive than the first, but as potent for harm as
these were for good. Many were narcotics or valuable anesthetics, local or
otherwise, which have proved to be the creators of habits more terrible
than the age-long enemies of mankind, alcohol and opium. When the man
whose wife takes a coal-tar derivative for headache finds that it stills
her heart forever, the incident affects his whole opinion of drugs. When
the patient for whom one of the new drugs has been prescribed by a
practitioner without knowledge of his idiosyncrasies reacts to it fatally,
it is slight consolation to his survivors that his case is described in
print under the heading, "A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning." When a
mother sees her son go to the bad by taking cocaine, or heroin, or some
other drug of whose existence she was ignorant a dozen years ago, she may
be pardoned for believing that all drugs, or at least all newly discovered
drugs, are tools of the devil.

And this feeling is intensified by one of our national faults--the
tendency to jump at conclusions, to overdo things, to run from one evil to
its opposite, without stopping at the harmless mean. We think we are
brighter and quicker than the Englishman or the German. They think we are
more superficial. Whatever name you give the quality it causes us to
"catch on" sooner, to work a good thing to death more thoroughly and to
drop it more quickly for something else, than any other known people,
ancient or modern. Somebody devises a new form of skate roller that makes
roller-skating a good sport. We find it out before anyone else and in a
few months the land is plastered from Maine to California with huge
skating halls or sheds. Everybody is skating at once and the roar of the
rollers resounds across the oceans. We skate ourselves out in a year or
two, and then the roar ceases, the sheds decay and roller-skating is once
more a normal amusement. Then someone invents the safety bicycle, and in a
trice all America, man, woman and child, is awheel. And we run this good
horse to death, and throw his body aside in our haste to discover
something new. Shortly afterward someone invents a new dance, or imports
it from Spanish America, and there is hardly time to snap one's finger
before we are all dancing, grandparents and children, the cook in the
kitchen and the street-cleaner on the boulevard.

We display as little moderation in our therapeutics. We can not get over
the idea that a remedy of proved value in a particular case may be good
for all others. Our proprietary medicines will cure everything from
tuberculosis to cancer. If massage has relieved rheumatism, why should it
not be good also for typhoid? The Tumtum Springs did my uncle's gout so
much good; why doesn't your cousin try them for her headaches? And even
so, drugs must be all good or bad. Many of us remember the old household
remedies, tonics or laxatives or what not, with which the children were
all dosed at intervals, whether they were ill or not. That was in the days
when all drugs were good: when one "took something" internally for
everything that happened to him. Now the pendulum has swung to the other
side--that is all. If we can ever settle down to the rational way of
regarding these things, we shall discover, what sensible medical men have
always known, and what druggists as well as mere laymen can not afford to
neglect, that there is no such thing as a panacea, and that all rational
therapeutics is based on common sense study of the disease--finding out
what is the cause and endeavoring to abate that cause. The cause may be
such that surgery is indicated, or serum, or regulation of diet, or change
of scene. It may obviously indicate the administration of a drug. I once
heard a clever lawyer in a poisoning case, in an endeavor to discredit a
physician, whom we shall call Dr. Jones, tell the following anecdote: (Dr.
Jones, who had been called in when the victim was about to expire, had
recommended the application of ice). Said the lawyer:

"A workman was tamping a charge of blasting-powder with a crowbar, when
the charge went off prematurely and the bar was driven through the
unfortunate man's body, so that part of it protruded on either side: A
local physician was summoned, and after some study he pronounced as
follows: 'Now, if I let that bar stay there, you'll die. If I pull it out,
you'll die. But I'll give you a pill that may melt it where it is!' In
this emergency," the lawyer went on to say, "Dr. Jones doubtless would
have prescribed _ice_."

Now the pill to melt the crowbar may stand for our former excessive and
absurd regard for drugs. The application of ice in the same emergency may
likewise represent a universal resort to hydrotherapy. Neither of them is
logical. There is place for each, but there are emergencies that can not
be met with either. Still, to abandon one method of treatment simply
because additional methods have proved to be valuable, would be as absurd
as to give up talking upon the invention of writing or to prohibit the
raising of corn on land that will produce wheat.

No: we shall doubtless continue to use drugs and we shall continue to need
the druggist. What can he do to make his business more valued and
respected, more useful to the public and more profitable to himself? For
there can be no doubt that he will finally succeed in attaining all these
desirable results together, or fail in all. Here and there we may find a
man who is making a fortune out of public credulity and ignorance, or, on
the other hand, one who is giving the public more service than it pays for
and ruining himself in the process; but in general and on the average
personal and public interest run pretty well hand in hand. Henry Ford
makes his millions because he is producing something that the people want.
St. Jacob's Oil, once the most widely advertised nostrum on the continent,
cost its promoters a fortune because there was nothing in it that one
might not find in some other oil or grease.

What then, I repeat, must the pharmacist do to succeed, personally and
professionally? I welcome this opportunity to tell you what I think. My
advice comes from the outside--often the most valuable source. I have so
little to do with pharmacy, either as a profession or as a business that I
stand far enough away to get a bird's-eye view. And if you think that any
advice, based on this view, is worthless, it will be a consolation to all
of us to realize that no force on earth can compel you to take it.

It is doubtless too late to lament or try to resist the course of business
that has gone far to turn the pharmacy into a department store. But let me
urge you not to let this tendency run wild. There are side-lines that
belong properly to pharmacy, such as all those pertaining to hygiene or
sanitation; to the toilet, to bodily refreshment. I do not see why one
should not expect to find at his pharmacist's, soap, or tooth-brushes, or
sponges. I do not see why the thirsty man should not go there for mineral
water as well as the dyspeptic for pills. But I fail to see the connection
between pharmacy and magazines, or stationery or candy. By selling these
the druggist puts himself at once into competition with the department
stores. There can be no doubt about who will win out in any such
competition as that. But I believe there is still a place in the community
for any special line of business if its proprietor sticks to his specialty
and makes himself a recognized expert in it. The department store spreads
itself too thin--there is no room for intensive development at any point
of its vast expanse. Its general success is due to this very fact. I am
not now speaking of the rural community where there is room only for one
general store selling everything that the community needs. But my
statement holds good for the city and the large town.

Let me illustrate by an instance in which we librarians are professionally
interested--the book store. Once every town had its book-store. Now they
are rare. We have few such stores even in a city of the size of St. Louis.
Every department store has its book-section. They are rarely satisfactory.
Everybody is lamenting the disappearance of the old book-store, with its
old scholarly proprietor who knew books and the book-market; who loved
books and the book-business. Quarts of ink have been wasted in trying to
account for his disappearance. The Public Library, for one thing, has been
blamed for it. I have no time now to disprove this, though it is very
clear to me that libraries help the book trade instead of hindering it. I
shall simply give you my version of the trouble. The book-dealer
disappeared, as soon as he entered into competition with the department
store. He put in side lines of toys, and art supplies, and cameras and
candy. He began to spread himself thin and had no time for expert
concentration on his one specialty. Thus he lost his one advantage over
the department store--his strength in the region where it was weak; and of
course he succumbed. If you will think for a moment of the special
businesses that have survived the competition of the department store, you
will see that they are precisely the ones that have resisted this
temptation to spread themselves and have been content to remain experts.
Look at the men's furnishing stores. Would they have survived if they had
begun to sell cigars and lawn-mowers? Look at the retail shoe stores, the
opticians, the cigar stores, the bakers, the meat markets, the
confectioners, the restaurants of all grades! They have all to compete
with the department stores, but their customers realize that they have
something to offer that can be offered by no department store--expert
service in one line, due to some one's life-long training, experience and
devotion to the public.

I do not want the pharmacist to go the way of the book dealers. Already
some of the department stores include drug departments. I do not see how
these can be as good as independent pharmacies. But I do not see the
essential difference between a drug department in a store that sells also
cigars and stationery and confectionery, and a so-called independent
pharmacy that also distributes these very things.

I am assuming that the druggist is an expert. That is the object of our
colleges of pharmacy, as I understand the matter. As a librarian I want to
deal with a book man who knows more of the book business than I do. I want
to ask his advice and be able to rely on it. When I have printing to be
done, I like to give it to a man who knows more about the printed page
than I do. When I buy bread, or shoes, or a house, or a farm I like to
deal with recognized experts in these articles. How much more when I am
purchasing substances where expert knowledge will turn the balance between
life and death. I have gossiped with pharmacists enough to know that all
physicians do not avoid incompatibles in their prescriptions, and that
occasionally a combination falls into the prescription clerk's hands,
which, if made up as he reads it would produce a poisonous compound, or
perhaps even an explosive mixture. Two heads are better than one, and if
my physician ever makes a mistake of this kind I look to my pharmacist to
see that it shall not reach the practical stage.

I recognize the great value and service of the department store, but I do
not go there for my law or medicine; neither do I care to resort thither
for my pharmacy. I want our separate drug stores to persist, and I want
them to remain in charge of experts.

And when the store deals in other things than purely therapeutic
preparations--which I have already said I think probably unavoidable,--I
want it to present the aspect of a pharmacy that deals also in toilet
preparations and mineral water, not of an establishment for dispensing
soda-water and soap, where one may have a prescription filled on the side,
in an emergency. And when the emergency does arise, I should have the
pharmacy respond to it. It is the place where we naturally look in an
emergency--the spot to which the victim of an accident is carried
directly--the one where the lady bends her steps when she feels that she
is going to faint. In hundreds of cases the drug store is our only
standby, and it should be the druggist's business to see that it never
fails us. There are pharmacies where a telephone message brings an
unfailing response; there are others to which one would as soon think of
sending an inquiry regarding a Biblical quotation. To which type, do you
think, will the public prefer to resort?

Then there are those little courtesies that no retail business is obliged
to offer, but that the public has been accustomed to expect from the
druggist--the cashing of checks, the changing of bills, the furnishing of
postage stamps, the consultation of the city directory. There can be no
reason for resorting to a drug store for all these favors except that the
pharmacist has an enviable reputation as the man who is most likely to
grant them. And yet I begin to hear druggists complaining of the results
of this reputation, of which they ought to be proud; I see them pointing
out that there is no profit on postage stamps and no commission for
changing a bill. They intimate, further, that although it may be proper
for them to put themselves out for regular customers, it is absurd for
strangers to ask for these courtesies. I marvel when I hear these
sentiments. If this popular impression regarding the courtesy of the
druggist did not exist, it would be worth the expenditure of vast sums and
the labor of a lifetime to create it. To deliberately undo it would be as
foolish as to lock the door in the face of customers.

I do not believe that in St. Louis the pharmaceutical profession is
generally averse to a reputation for generous public service, and I base
my belief on some degree of personal knowledge. The St. Louis Public
Library operates about sixty delivery stations in various parts of the
city. These stations are all in drug stores. The work connected with them,
though light, is by no means inconsiderable, and yet not one of the
druggists who undertake it charges the library a cent for his space or his
services. Doubtless they expect a return from the increased attractiveness
of their places to the public. I hope that they get it and I believe that
they do. At any rate we have evidence here of the pharmacist's belief that
the bread of public service, cast upon the waters, will sooner or later
return.

You will notice that I am saying nothing about advertising. One would
think from the pharmaceutical papers, with which I am not unfamiliar, that
the druggist's chief end was to have a sensational show window of some
kind. These things are not unimportant, but I do not dwell on them because
I believe that if a druggist realizes the importance of his profession; if
he makes himself a recognized expert in it; if he sticks to it and
magnifies it; if he makes his place indispensable to the community around
him, the first point to which the citizens resort for help in an
emergency, an unfailing center of courtesy and favor--he may fill his
window with toilet soap, or monkeys, or with nothing at all--there will
still be a trodden path up to his door.

Gentlemen, you have chosen as your life work a profession that I believe
to be indispensable to human welfare--one of enviable tradition and honor
and with standing and reputation in the community that set it apart, in
some degree from all others. And while I would not have you neglect the
material success that it may bring you, I would urge you to expect this as
a result rather than strive for it as an immediate end. I would have you
labor to maintain and develop the special knowledge that you have gained
in this institution, to hold up the standard of courtesy and helpfulness
under which you can best do public service, confident that if you do these
things, business standing and financial success will also be added unto
you.




HOW THE COMMUNITY EDUCATES ITSELF[15]

[15] Read before the American Library Association, Asbury Park,
N.J., June 27, 1916.


In endeavoring to distinguish between self-education and education by
others, one meets with considerable difficulty. If a boy reads Mill's
"Political Economy'" he is surely educating himself; but if after reading
each chapter he visits a class and answers certain questions propounded
for the purpose of ascertaining whether he has read it at all, or has read
it understandingly, then we are accustomed to transfer the credit for the
educative process to the questioner, and say that the boy has been
educated at school or college. As a matter of fact, I think most of us are
self-educated. Not only is most of what an adult knows and can do,
acquired outside of school, but in most of what he learned even there he
was self-taught. His so-called teachers assigned tasks to him and saw that
he performed them. If he did not, they subjected him to discipline. Once
or twice in a lifetime most of us have run up against a real teacher--a
man or a woman that really played a major part in shaping our minds as
they now are--our stock of knowledge, our ways of thought, our methods of
doing things. These men have stood and are still standing (though they may
have joined the great majority long ago) athwart the stream of sensation
as it passes through us, and are determining what part shall be stored up,
and where; what kind of action shall ultimately result from it. The
influence of a good teacher spreads farther and lasts longer than that of
any other man. If his words have been recorded in books it may reach
across the seas and down the ages.

There is another reason why the distinction between school education and
self-education breaks down. If the boy with whom we began had any teacher
at all it was John Stuart Mill, and this man was his teacher whether or
not his reading of the book was prescribed and tested in a class-room. I
would not have you think that I would abolish schools and colleges. I wish
we had more of the right kind, but the chief factor in educative
acquirement will still be the pupil.

So when the community educates itself, as it doubtless does and as it must
do, it simply continues a process with which it has always been familiar,
but without control, or under its own control. Of all the things that we
learn, control is the most vital. What we are is the sum of those things
that we do not repress. We begin without self-repression and have to be
controlled by others. When we learn to exercise control ourselves, it is
right that even our education should revert wholly to what it has long
been in greater part--a voluntary process.

This does not mean that at this time the pupil abandons guidance. It means
that he is free to choose his own guides and the place and method of using
them. Some rely wholly on experience; others are wise enough to see that
life is too short and too narrow to acquire all that we need, and they set
about to make use also of that acquired by others. Some of these wiser
ones use only their companions and acquaintances; others read books. The
wisest are opportunists; they make use of all these methods as they have
occasion. Their reading does not make them avoid the exchange of ideas by
conversation, nor does the acquirement of ideas in either way preclude
learning daily by experience, or make reflection useless or unnecessary.

He who lives a full life acquires ideas as he may, causes them to combine,
change and generate in his own mind, and then translates them into action
of some kind. He who omits any of these things cannot be said to have
really lived. He cannot, it is true, fail to acquire ideas unless he is an
idiot; but he may fail to acquire them broadly, and may even make the
mistake of thinking that he can create them in his own mind.

He may, however, acquire fully and then merely store without change or
combination; that is, he may turn his brain into a warehouse instead of
using it as a factory.

And the man who has acquired broadly and worked over his raw material into