A LIBRARIAN'S OPEN SHELF

ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS

ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Ph. D. 

1920

PREFACE

The papers here gathered together represent the activities of a librarianin directions outside the boundaries of his professional career, althoughthe influences of it may be detected in them here and there. Except forthose influences they have little connection and the transition of thoughtand treatment from one to another may occasionally seem violent. It may, however, serve to protect the reader from the assaults of monotony. 

A. E. B. 

CONTENTS

DO READERS READ? (_The Critic_, July, 1901, p. 67-70)

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE READ? (_The Book Lover_, January, 1904, p. 12-16)

THE PASSING OF THE POSSESSIVE; A STUDY OF BOOK TITLES (_The Book Buyer_, June, 1897, p. 500-1)

SELECTIVE EDUCATION (_Educational Review_, November, 1907, p. 365-73)

THE USES OF FICTION Read before the American Library Association, Asheville Conference, May 28, 1907. (_A. L. A. Bulletin_, July, 1907, p. 183-7)

THE VALUE OF ASSOCIATION Delivered before the Library Associations of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio, October 9-18, 1907. (_Library Journal_, January, 1908, p. 3-9)

MODERN EDUCATIONAL METHODS (_Notes and News_, Montclair, N. J. , July, 1908)

SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES Read at the opening of the Chestnut Hill Branch, Philadelphia Free Library, January 22, 1909. (_Library Journal_, February, 1909, p. 48-52)

SIMON NEWCOMB: AMERICA'S FOREMOST ASTRONOMER (_Review of Reviews_, August, 1909, p. 171-4)

THE COMPANIONSHIP OF BOOKS Read before the Pacific Northwest Library Association, June, 1910. (_P. N. W. L. A. Proceedings_, 1910, p. 8-23)

ATOMIC THEORIES OF ENERGY Read before the St. Louis Academy of Science. (_The Monist_, October, 1912, p. 580-5)

THE ADVERTISEMENT OF IDEAS (_Minnesota Library Notes and News_, December, 1912, p. 190-7)

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, AND THE SOCIAL CENTER MOVEMENT Read before the National Education Association. (_N. E. A. Proceedings_, 1912, p. 240-5)

THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF VIOLENCE (_St. Louis Mirror_, July 18, 1913)

THE ART OF RE-READING

HISTORY AND HEREDITY Read before the New England Society of St. Louis. (_New England Society of St. Louis_. _Proceedings_, 29th year, p. 13-20)

WHAT THE FLAG STANDS FOR A Flag Day address in St. Peter's church, St. Louis. (_St. Louis Republic_, June 15, 1914)

THE PEOPLE'S SHARE IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY Read before the Chicago Women's Club, January 6, 1915. (_Library Journal_, April, 1915, p. 227-32)

SOME TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN THOUGHT Read before the New York Library Association at Squirrel Inn, Haines Falls, September 28, 1915. (_Library Journal_, November, 1915, p. 771-7)

DRUGS AND THE MAN A Commencement address to the graduating class of the School of Pharmacy, St. Louis, May 19, 1915. (_Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_, August, 1915, p. 915-22)

HOW THE COMMUNITY EDUCATES ITSELF Read before the American Library Association, Asbury Park, N. J. , June 27, 1916. (_Library Journal_, August, 1916, p. 541-7)

CLUBWOMEN'S READING (_The Bookman_, January-March, 1915, p. 515-21, 642-7, 64-70)

BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES (_Yale Review_, January, 1917, p. 358-68)

THE MAGIC CASEMENT Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis. 

A WORD TO BELIEVERS Address at the closing section of the Church School of Religious Instruction. 

INDEX

A LIBRARIAN'S OPEN SHELF

ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS

DO READERS READ?

Those who are interested in the proper use of our libraries are askingcontinually, "What do readers read?" and the tables of class-percentagesin the annual reports of those institutions show that librarians are atleast making an attempt to satisfy these queries. But a question that isstill more fundamental and quite as vital is: Do readers read at all? Thisis not a paradox, but a common-sense question, as the following suggestivelittle incident will show. The librarian-in-charge of a crowded branchcirculating-library in New York City had occasion to talk, not long ago, to one of her "star" borrowers, a youth who had taken out his two goodbooks a week regularly for nearly a year and whom she had looked upon as amodel--so much so that she had never thought it necessary to advise withhim regarding his reading. In response to a question this lad made answersomewhat as follows: "Yes, ma'am, I'm doing pretty well with my reading. Ithink I should get on nicely if I could only once manage to read a bookthrough; but somehow I can't seem to do it. " This boy had actually takento his home nearly a hundred books, returning each regularly and borrowinganother, without reading to the end of a single one of them. 

That this case is not isolated and abnormal, but is typical of the way inwhich a large class of readers treat books, there is, as we shall see, only too much reason to believe. 

The facts are peculiarly hard to get at. At first sight there would seemto be no way to find out whether the books that our libraries circulatehave been read through from cover to cover, or only half through, or notat all. To be sure, each borrower might be questioned on the subject as hereturned his book, but this method, would be resented as inquisitorial, and after all there would be no certainty that the data so gathered weretrue. By counting the stamps on the library book-card or dating-slip wecan tell how many times a book has been borrowed, but this gives us noinformation about whether it has or has not been read. Fortunately for ourpresent purpose, however, many works are published in a series of volumes, each of which is charged separately, and an examination of the differentslips will tell us whether or not the whole work has been read through byall those who borrowed it. If, for instance in a two-volume work eachvolume has gone out twenty times, twenty borrowers either have read itthrough or have stopped somewhere in the second volume, while if the firstvolume is charged twenty times and the second only fourteen, it is certainthat six of those who took out the first volume did not get as far as thesecond. In works of more than two volumes we can tell with still greateraccuracy at what point the reader's interest was insufficient to carry himfurther. 

Such an investigation has been made of all works in more than one volumecontained in seven branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, and with veryfew exceptions it has been found that each successive volume in a serieshas been read by fewer persons than the one immediately preceding. What istrue of books in more than one volume is presumably also true, althoughperhaps in a less degree, of one-volume works, although we have no meansof showing it directly. Among the readers of every book, then, there aregenerally some who, for one reason or other, do not read it to the end. Our question, "Do readers read?" is thus answered in the negative for alarge number of cases. The supplementary question, "Why do not readersread?" occurs at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rathertoo deeply into psychology. Whether this tendency to leave the latter partof books unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating thepresent investigation at intervals of a year or more. The probability isthat it is due to pure lack of interest. For some reason or other, manypersons begin to read books that fail to hold their attention. In a largenumber of cases this is doubtless due to a feeling that one "ought toread" certain books and certain classes of books. A sense of duty carriesthe reader part way through his task, but he weakens before he hasfinished it. 

This shows how necessary it is to stimulate one's general interest in asubject before advising him to read a book that is not itself calculatedto arouse and sustain that interest. Possibly the modern newspaper habit, with its encouragement of slipshod reading, may play its part in producingthe general result, and doubtless a careful detailed investigation wouldreveal still other partial causes, but the chief and determining causemust be lack of interest. And it is to be feared that instead of takingmeasures to arouse a permanent interest in good literature, which would initself lead to the reading of standard works and would sustain the readeruntil he had finished his task, we have often tried to replace such aninterest by a fictitious and temporary stimulus, due to appeals to duty, or to that vague and confused idea that one should "improve one's mind, "unaccompanied by any definite plan of ways and means. There is no morepowerful moral motor than duty, but it loses its force when we try toapply it to cases that lie without the province of ethics. The man who hasno permanent interest in historical literature, and who is impelled tobegin a six-volume history because he conceives it to be his "duty" toread it, is apt to conclude, before he has finished the second volume, that his is a case where inclination (or in this instance disinclination)is the proper guide. 

As a matter of fact, the formation of a cultivated and permanent taste forgood reading is generally a matter of lifelong education. It must be begunwhen the child reads his first book. An encouraging sign for the future isthe care that is now taken in all good libraries to supervise the readingof children and to provide for them special quarters and facilities. Asomewhat disheartening circumstance, on the other hand, is themultiplication of annotated and abbreviated children's editions of allsorts of works that were read by the last generation of children withoutany such treatment. This kind of boned chicken may be very well for themental invalid, but the ordinary child prefers to separate his meat fromthe "drumstick" by his own unaided effort, and there is no doubt that itis better for him to do so. 

In the following table, the average circulation of first volumes, secondvolumes, etc. , is given for each of seven classes of works. The fallingoff from volume to volume is noticeable in each class. It is most markedin science, and least so, as might be expected, in fiction. Yet it isremarkable that there should be any falling off at all in fiction. Therecord shows that the proportion of readers who cannot even read to theend of a novel is relatively large. These are doubtless the good peoplewho speak of Dickens as "solid reading" and who regard Thackeray with asremote an eye as they do Gibbon. For such "The Duchess" furnishes goodmental pabulum, and Miss Corelli provides flights into the loftier regionsof philosophy. 

 Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. CLASS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII IX. X. XI. XII. 

 History 10. 1 6. 9 4. 9 4. 4 4. 6 4. 3 2. 5 2. 8 1. 0 0. 5 1. 0 3. 0 Biography 7. 2 5. 1 3. 0 2. 3 1. 6 1. 0 1. 6 1. 2 1. 0 2. Travel 9. 2 7. 9 Literature 7. 3 5. 9 3. 5 3. 8 5. 3 6. 6 19. 0 15. 0 21. 0 Arts 4. 7 3. 7 3. 0 Sciences 5. 2 2. 7 1. 5 Fiction 22. 0 18. 9 15. 8 16. 26. 16. 

The figures in the table, as has been stated, are averages, and the numberof cases averaged decreases rapidly as we reach the later volumes, because, of course, the number of works that run beyond four or fivevolumes is relatively small. Hence the figures for the higher volumes areirregular. Any volume may have been withdrawn separately for referencewithout any intention of reading its companions. Among the earlier volumessuch use counts for little, owing to the large number of volumes averaged, while it may and does make the figures for the later volumes irregular. Thus, under History the high number in the twelfth column representsone-twelfth volume of Froude, which was taken out three times, evidentlyfor separate reference, as the eleventh was withdrawn but once. Furthermore, apart from this irregularity, the figures for the latervolumes are relatively large, for a work in many volumes is apt to be astandard, and although its use falls rapidly from start to finish enoughreaders persevere to the end to make the final averages compare undulywell with the initial ones where the high use of the same work is averagedin with smaller use of dozens of other first and second volumes. That thefalling off from beginning to end in such long works is much more strikingthan would appear from the averages alone may be seen from the followingrecords of separate works in numerous volumes:

 VOLUMES I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X HISTORY

 Grote, "Greece" 11 6 5 2 1 0 1 1 1 0 Bancroft, "United States" 22 10 6 8 10 8 Hume, "England" 24 7 5 2 1 1 Gibbon, "Rome" 38 12 7 3 4 6 Motley, "United Netherlands" 7 1 1 1 Prescott, "Ferdinand and Isabella" 20 4 2 Carlyle, "French Revolution" 18 10 8 McCarthy, "Our Own Times" 27 8 11

 BIOGRAPHY

 Bourienne, "Memoirs of Napoleon" 19 18 9 7 Longfellow's "Life" 6 4 2 Nicolay and Hay, "Lincoln" 6 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 2 Carlyle, "Frederick the Great" 7 3 2 2 2

 FICTION

 Dumas, "Vicomte de Bragelonne" 31 30 24 22 21 16 Dumas, "Monte Cristo" 27 17 18 Dickens, "Our Mutual Friend" 5 4 1 0 Stowe, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 37 24

Of course, these could be multiplied indefinitely. They are sufficientlyinteresting apart from all comment. One would hardly believe withoutdirect evidence that of thirty-one persons who began one of Dumas'sromances scarcely half would read it to the end, or that not one of fivepersons who essayed Dickens's "Mutual Friend" would succeed in gettingthrough it. 

Those who think that there can be no pathos in statistics are invited toponder this table deeply. Can anyone think unmoved of those two dozenreaders who, feeling impelled by desire for an intellectual stimulant totake up Hume, found therein a soporific instead and fell by the wayside?

A curious fact is that the tendency to attempt to "begin at the beginning"is so strong that it sometimes extends to collected works in which thereis no sequence from volume to volume. Thus we have the following:

 Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. 

 Chaucer, "Poetical Works" 38 9 5 Milton, "Poetical Works" 19 8 Longfellow, "Poetical Works" 14 15 2 10 3 3 Emerson, "Essays" 48 13 Ward, "English Poets" 13 2 6

There are of course exceptions to the rule that circulation decreasessteadily from volume to volume. Here are a few:

 Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. I. II. III. IV. 

 Fiske, "Old Virginia" 26 24 Spears, "History of the Navy" 44 39 36 36 Andrews, "Last Quarter Century" 8 8 Kennan, "Siberia" 15 13

In the case of the two-volume works the interest-sustaining power may notalways be as great as would appear, because when the reader desires it, two volumes are given out as one; but the stamps on the dating-slips showthat this fact counted for little in the present instances. 

I would not assume that the inferences in the present article are of anyspecial value. The statistical facts are the thing. So far as I know, noone has called attention to them before, and they are certainly worthy ofall interest and attention. 

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE READ?

Does the reading public read because it has a literary taste or for someother reason? In the case of the public library, for instance, does a manstart with an overwhelming desire to read or study books and is heimpelled thereby to seek out the place where he may most easily and bestobtain them? Or is he primarily attracted to the library by some otherconsideration, his love for books and reading acting only in a secondarymanner? The New York Public Library, for instance, carries on the registrybooks of its circulating department nearly 400, 000 names, and in thecourse of a year nearly 35, 000 new applications are made for the use ofits branch libraries, scattered over different parts of the city. Whatbrings these people to the library? This is no idle question. The numberof library users, large as it is, represents too small a fraction of ourpopulation. If it is a good thing to provide free reading matter for ourpeople--and every large city in the country has committed itself to thetruth of this proposition--we should certainly try to see that what wefurnish is used by all who need it. Hence an examination into the motivesthat induce people to make their first use of a free public library maybring out information that is not only interesting but useful. To this endseveral hundred regular users of the branches of the New York PublicLibrary were recently asked this question directly, and the answers aretabulated and discussed below. In each of sixteen branch libraries thepersons interrogated numbered forty--ten each of men, women, boys andgirls. Thirty answers have been thrown out for irrelevancy ordefectiveness. The others are classified in the following table:

 A B C D E F G H I J K L Totals

 Men 6 64 10 . . . . . . 37 20 3 1 9 4 154 Boys 38 63 28 . . 4 3 9 6 5 . . . . 3 159 Women 12 67 14 4 . . . . 20 21 2 1 2 5 148 Girls 33 69 34 . . . . . . 5 3 3 . . . . 2 149 Total 89 263 86 4 4 3 71 50 13 2 11 14 610

 Col. A: Sent or Told by Teacher Col. B: Sent or Told by Friend Col. C: Sent or Told by Relative Col. D: Sent or Told by Clergyman Col. E: Sent or Told by Library Assistant Col. F: Through Reading Room Col. G: Saw Building Col. H: Saw Sign Col. I: Saw Library Books Col. J: Saw Bulletin Col. K: Saw Article in Paper Col. L: Sought Library

It will be seen that the vast majority of those questioned were led to thelibrary by some circumstance other than the simple desire to find a placewhere books could be obtained. Of more than six hundred persons whoseanswers are here recorded only fourteen found the library as the result ofa direct search for it prompted by a desire to read. In a majority of theother cases, of course, perhaps in all of them, the desire to read had itspart, but this desire was awakened by hearing a mention of the library orby seeing it or something connected with it. These determiningcircumstances fall into two classes, those that worked through the ear andthose that operated through the eye. 

Those who _heard_ of the library in some way numbered 449, while those who_saw_ it or something connected with it were only 147--an interestingfact, especially as we are told by psychologists that apprehension andmemory through sight are of a higher type than the same functions whereexercised through hearing. Probably, however, this difference wasdependent on the fact that the thing heard was in most cases a directinjunction or a piece of advice, while the thing seen did not act withsimilar urgency. There are some surprises in the table. For instance, onlyfour persons were sent directly to libraries by persons employed therein. Doubtless the average library assistant wishes to get as far from "shop"as possible in her leisure hours, but it is still disappointing to findthat those who are employed in our libraries exercise so little influencein bringing persons to use them. The same thing is true of the influenceof reading rooms. In many of the branch libraries in New York there areseparate reading rooms to which others than card-holders in the libraryare admitted, and one of the chief arguments for this has been that theuser of such a room, having become accustomed to resort to the librarybuilding, would be apt to use the books. Apparently, however, such personsare in the minority. No less disappointing is the slight influence of theclergy. Only four persons report this as a determining influence and thesewere all women connected with a branch which was formerly the parishlibrary of a New York church. 

The influence of the press, too, seems to amount to little, in spite ofthe fact that the newspapers in New York have freely commented on thevaluable work of the branch libraries and have called attention to it bothin the news and editorial columns whenever occasion offered. Do thereaders of library books in New York shun the public-press, or do they payscant heed to what they read therein?

Another somewhat noteworthy fact is that of the 449 persons who sought thelibrary by advice of some one, only 89 were sent by teachers. But perhapsthis is unfair. Of 265 boys and girls who thus came to the library, only71 were sent by teachers. This is a larger percentage, but it is still notso large as we might expect. 

The difference between adults and children comes out quite strikingly in afew instances. We should have foreseen this of course in the case ofadvice by teachers, which was reported by 71 children and only 18 adultsas a reason for visiting the library. Here we should not have expectedthis reason to be given by adults at all. Doubtless these were chieflyyoung men and women who had used the library since their school-days. Inlike manner the advice or injunction of relatives was more patent withchildren than with adults, the proportion here being 62 to 24. Thisprobably illustrates the power of parental injunction. In another case thedifference comes out in a wholly unexpected way. Of the 71 persons whoreported that they were attracted to the library by seeing the buildings, 57 were adults and only 14 children. The same is true of those who wereled in by seeing a sign, who numbered 41 adults to only 9 children. Thisseems to show either that adults are more observant or that children aremore diffident in following out an impulse of this kind. It completelynegatives the ordinary impression among librarians, at least in New York, where it has been believed that the sight of a library building, especially where the work going on inside is visible from the street, is apotent attraction to the young. Some of the new branch buildings in NewYork have even been planned with a special view to the exercise of thiskind of attraction. 

The small number of persons who were attracted by printed matter, inlibrary or general publications, were entirely adults. The one instancewhere age seems to exercise no particular influence is that of the adviceof friends, by which old and young alike seem to have profited. 

The influence of sex does not appear clearly, although among those whofollowed the injunction of relatives the women and girls are slightly inthe majority, and the four who were sent by clergymen were all women. Ofthose who were attracted by the buildings 46 were male and 25 female, which may mean that men are somewhat more observant or less diffident thanwomen. 

A few of those questioned relate their experiences at some length. Saysone boy: "A boy friend of mine said he belonged to this library and hefound some very good books here. He asked me if I wanted to join; I saidyes. He told me I would have to get a reference. I got one, and joinedthis library. " Another one reports: "I saw a boy in the street and askedhim where he was going. He said he was going to the library. I asked himwhat the library was and he told me; so I came up here and have beencoming ever since. "

Critical judgment is shown by some of the young people. One boy says: "Iheard all the other boys saying it was a good library and that the bookswere better kept than in a majority of libraries. " A girl says thatfriends "told her what nice books were in this library. " In one case aboy's brother "told him he could get the best books here for his needs. "

The combination of man and book seems to be very attractive. One child"saw a boy in school with a book, telling what a boy should know aboutelectricity; I wanted to read that book and joined the library. " Others"followed a crowd of little boys with books"; "saw children taking booksout of the building and asked them about joining"; "saw a boy carryingbooks and asked if there was a library in the neighborhood. " A woman "sawa child with a library book in the park and asked her for the address ofthe library. " Sometimes the book alone does the work, as shown by thefollowing laconic report: "Found a book in the park; took it to thelibrary; joined it. " A cause of sorrow to many librarians who have decidedideas regarding literature for children will be the report of a boy whoexclaimed: "Horatio Alger did it!" On being asked to explain, he said thata friend had brought one of Alger's books to his house and that he wasthereby attracted to the library. 

Among those who were brought in by relatives are children who were firstcarried by their mothers to the library as infants and so grew naturallyinto its use. Sometimes the influence works upward instead of downward, for several adults report that their children brought them to the libraryor induced them to visit it. One man reports that he "got married and hiswife induced him to come. "

Some of the reasons given are curious. A few are unconnected with the useof books. One girl came to the library because "it was a very handylibrary"; another, because she "saw it was a nice place to come to on arainy day. " Still another frankly avows that "it was the fad among theboys and girls of our neighborhood; we used to meet at the library. " Apostman reported that he entered the library first in the line of hisduty, but was attracted by it and began to take out books. A clergyman hadhis attention called to the library by requests from choir-boys that heshould sign their application blanks; afterwards thinking that he mightfind books there for his own reading, he became a regular user. One usercame first to the library to see an exhibition of pictures of old NewYork. A recent importation says: "When I came from Paris I found all mycousins speaking English; 'well, ' they said, 'go to the library and takebooks'"--a process that doubtless did its share toward making an Americanof the new arrival. In another case, the Americanizing process has not yetreached the stage where the user's English is altogether intelligible. Hesays: "Because I like to read the book. I ask the bakery lady to myreference and I sing my neam" [sign my name?]. 

Here are some examples of recently acquired elegance in diction that arealmost baboo-like in their hopelessness: "Because it interest about thecountries that are far away. It gives knowledge to many of the people inthis country. " "So as to obtain knowledge from them and by reading booksfind out how the great men were in their former days and all about themand the world and its people. " It will be seen that the last two writerswere among those who misunderstood our questions and told why they readbooks rather than how they were first led to the use of a library. 

These reports are far from possessing merely a passing interest for thecurious. For the public librarian, whose wish it is to reach as large aproportion of the public as possible, they are full of valuable hints. They emphasize, for instance, the urgent necessity of winning the goodwill of the public, and they forcibly remind us that this is of more valuein gaining a foothold for the library than columns of notices in thepapers or thousands of circulars or cards distributed in the neighborhood. It is even more potent than a beautiful building. Attractive as this is, its value as an influence to secure new readers is vastly less than areputation for hospitality and helpfulness. 

In looking over the figures one rather disquieting thought cannot be keptdown. If the good will of the public is so potent in increasing the use ofthe library, the ill will of the same public must be equally potent in theopposite direction. Some of those who are satisfied with us and our workare here put on record. How about the dissatisfied? A record of thesemight be even more interesting, for it would point out weaknesses to bestrengthened and errors to be avoided--but that, as Kipling says, "isanother story. "

THE PASSING OF THE POSSESSIVE: A STUDY OF BOOK-TITLES

If there is one particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over theRomance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is thatconferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the soleremaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflectedtongue. That we should still be able to speak of "the baker's wife's dog"instead of "the dog of the wife of the baker" certainly should be regardedby English-speaking people as a precious birthright. Yet, there areincreasing evidences of a tendency to discard this only remainingcase-ending and to replace its powerful backbone with the comparativelylimp and cartilaginous preposition. This tendency has not yet appeared somuch in our spoken as in our written language, and even here only in themost formal parts of it. It is especially noticeable in the diction of thepurely formal title and heading. 

That the reader may have something beyond an unsupported assertion thatthis is the case, I purpose to offer in evidence the titles of some recentworks of fiction, and to make a brief statistical study of them. 

The titles were taken from the adult fiction lists in the MonthlyBulletins of the New York Free Circulating Library from November, 1895, toMarch, 1897, inclusive, and are all such titles as contain a possessive, whether expressed by the possessive case or by the preposition "of" withthe objective. Some titles are included in which the grammatical relationis slightly different, but all admit the alternative of the case-ending"'s" or "of" followed by the objective case. 

Of the 101 titles thus selected, 41 use the possessive case and 60 theobjective with the preposition. This proportion is in itself sufficientlysuggestive, but it becomes still more so by comparing it with thecorresponding proportion among a different set of titles. For this purpose101 fiction titles were selected, just as they appeared in alphabeticalorder, from a library catalogue bearing the date 1889; only those beingtaken, as before, that contain a possessive. Of these 101, 71 use thepossessive case and 30 the objective with "of. " In other words, whereeight years ago nearly three-quarters of such titles used the possessivecase, now only two-fifths use it, a proportionate reduction of nearlyone-half. 

The change appears still more striking when we study the titles a littlemore closely. Of those in the earlier series there is not one that is notgood, idiomatic English as it stands, whichever form is used; we may evensay that there is not one that would not be made less idiomatic by achange to the alternative form. Among the recent titles, however, whilethe forms using the possessive case are all better as they are, of the 60titles that use the objective with "of" only 22 would be injured by achange, and the reason why 8 of these are better as they are is simplythat change would destroy euphony. Among these eight are

 "The Indiscretion of the Duchess, " "The Flight of a Shadow, " "The Secret of Narcisse, " etc. , where the more idiomatic forms, "The Duchess's Indiscretion, " "Narcisse's Secret, " "A Shadow's Flight, " etc. , are certainly not euphonic. 

Of the others, 8 would not be injured by a change, and no less than 30would be improved from the standpoint of idiomatic English. It may be wellto quote these thirty titles. They are:

 "The Shadow of Hilton Fernbrook, " "The Statement of Stella Maberly, " "The Shadow of John Wallace, " "The Banishment of Jessop Blythe, " "The Desire of the Moth, " "The Island of Dr. Moreau, " "The Damnation of Theron Ware, " "The Courtship of Morrice Buckler, " "The Daughter of a Stoic, " "The Lament of Dives, " "The Heart of Princess Osra, " "The Death of the Lion, " "The Vengeance of James Vansittart, " "The Wife of a Vain Man, " "The Crime of Henry Vane, " "The Son of Old Harry, " "The Honour of Savelli, " "The Life of Nancy, " "The Story of Lawrence Garthe, " "The Marriage of Esther, " "The House of Martha, " "Tales of an Engineer, " "Love-letters of a Worldly Woman, " "The Way of a Maid, " "The Soul of Pierre, " "The Day of Their Wedding, " "The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, " "The Hand of Ethelberta, " "The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher, " "The Love-affairs of an Old Maid. "

Of course, in such a division as this, much must depend on individualjudgment and bias. Probably no two persons would divide the list in justthe same way, but it is my belief that the general result in each casewould be much the same. To me the possessive in every one of theabove-quoted titles would have been more idiomatic, thus:

 "Hilton Fernbrook's Shadow, " "Stella Maberly's Statement, " "John Wallace's Shadow, " "Morrice Buckler's Courtship, " "A Stoic's Daughter, " "Henry Vane's Crime, " etc. , etc. 

In one case, at least, this fact has been recognized by a publisher, for"The Vengeance of James Vansittart, " whose title is included in the listgiven above, has appeared in a later edition as "James Vansittart'sVengeance"--a palpable improvement. 

I shall not discuss the cause of this change in the use of the possessive, though it seems to me an evident Gallicism, nor shall I open the questionof whether it is a mere passing fad or the beginning of an actualalteration in the language. However this may be, it seems undeniable thatthere is an actual and considerable difference in the use of thepossessive to-day and its use ten years ago, at least in formal titles andheadings. I have confined myself to book-titles, because that is thedepartment where the tendency presents itself to me most clearly; but itmay be seen on street signs, in advertisements, and in newspaper headings. It is not to be found yet in the spoken language, at least it is notnoticeable there, but it would be decidedly unsafe to prophesy that itwill never appear there. Ten years from now we may hear about "thebreaking of the arm of John Smith" and "the hat of Tom, " without a thoughtthat these phrases have not been part of our idiomatic speech sinceShakespeare's time. 

SELECTIVE EDUCATION[1]

 [1] Read before the Schoolmen of New York. 

Since Darwin called attention to the role of what he named "naturalselection" in the genesis and preservation of species, and since hissuccessors, both followers and opponents, have added to this many otherkinds of selection that are continually operative, it has becomeincreasingly evident that from one standpoint we may look on the sum ofnatural processes, organic and inorganic, as a vast selective system, asthe result of which things are as they are, whether the results are thepositions of celestial bodies or the relative places of human beings inthe intellectual or social scale. The exact constitution of the presentpopulation of New York is the result of a great number of selective acts, some regular, others more or less haphazard. Selection is no lessselection because it occurs by what we call chance--for chance is only ourname for the totality of trivial and unconsidered causes. When, however, we count man and man's efforts in the sum of natural objects and forces, we have to reckon with his intelligence in these selective processes. Idesire to call attention to the place that they play in educative systemsand in particular to the way in which they may be furthered or made moreeffective by books, especially by public collections of books. 

When we think of any kind of training as it affects the individual, wemost naturally regard it as changing that individual, as making him morefit, either for life in general or for some special form of life'sactivities. But when we think of it as affecting a whole community or awhole nation, we may regard it as essentially a selective process. In agiven community it is not only desirable that a certain number of menshould be trained to do a specified kind of work, but it is even moredesirable that these should be the men that are best fitted to do thiswork. When Mr. Luther Burbank brings into play the selection by means ofwhich he achieves his remarkable results in plant breeding he gets rid ofthe unfit by destruction, and as all are unfit for the moment that do notadvance the special end that he has in view, he burns up plants--new andinteresting varieties perhaps--by the hundred thousand. We cannot destroythe unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the educational point ofview unfitness is merely bad adjustment. There is a place for every man inthe world and it is the educators business to see that he reaches it, ifnot by formative, then by selective processes. This selection is badlymade in our present state of civilization. It depends to a large extentupon circumstances remote from the training itself--upon caprice, eitherthat of the person to be trained or of his parents, upon accidents ofbirth or situation, upon a thousand irrelevant things; but in every casethere are elements present in the training itself that aid in determiningit. A young man begins to study medicine, and he finds that his physicalrepulsion for work in the dissecting-room can not be overcome. He abandonsthe study and by doing so eliminates an unfit person. A boy who has nohead for figures enters a business college. He can not get his diploma, and the community is spared one bad bookkeeper. Certainly in someinstances, possibly in all, technical and professional schools that arenoted for the excellence of their product are superior not so much becausethey have better methods of training, but because their material is ofbetter quality, owing to selection exercised either purposely, orautomatically, or perhaps by some chance. The same is true of colleges. Oftwo institutions with the same curriculum and equally able instructors, the one with the widest reputation will turn out the best graduatesbecause it attracts abler men from a wider field. This is true even insuch a department as athletics. To him that hath shall be given. This ispurely an automatic selective effect. 

It would appear desirable to dwell more upon selective features ineducational training, to ascertain what they are in each case and how theywork, and to control and dispose them with more systematic care. Differentminds will always attach different degrees of importance to natural andacquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training bestowed uponthe absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there are personswhose natural aptitudes are so great that upon them a minimum of trainingwill produce a maximum effect. Such selective features as our presenteducational processes possess, the examination, for instance, are mostlyexclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather than to attract the fit. Here is a feature on which some attention may well be fixt. 

How do these considerations affect the subject of general education? Arewe to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and Latinfor the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be? Not so;for here we are training not experts but citizens. Discrimination heremust be not in the quality but in the quantity of training. We may dividethe members of any community into classes according as their formaleducation--their school and college training--has lasted one, two, three, four, or more years. There has been a selection here, but it has operated, in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special training. Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling to the endof a college course, and who by so doing would become more useful membersof the community, are obliged to be content with two or three years in thelower grades, while others, who are unfitted for the university, are keptat it until they take, or fail to take, the bachelor's degree. An idealstate of things, of course, would be to give each person the amount ofgeneral education for which he is fitted and then stop. This would bedifficult of realization even if financial considerations did not so ofteninterfere. But at least we may keep in view the desirability of preventingtoo many misfits and of insisting, so far as possible, on any selectivefeatures that we may discover in present systems. 

For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of agiven course of study to those who are desired to pursue it. If we canfind a way, for example, to make our high school courses attractive tothose who are qualified to take them, while at the same time renderingthem very distasteful to those who are not so qualified, we shallevidently have taken a step in the right direction. It is clear that bothparts of this prescription must be taken together or there is no trueselection. Much has been done of late years toward making educationalcourses of all kinds interesting and attractive, but it is to be fearedthat their attractiveness has been such as to appeal to the unfit as wellas to the fit. If we sugar-coat our pills indiscriminately and mix themwith candy, many will partake who need another kind of medicinealtogether. We must so arrange things that the fit will like while theunfit dislike, and for this purpose the less sugar-coating the better. This is no easy problem and it is intended merely to indicate it here, notto propose a general solution. 

The one thing to which attention should be directed is the role that maybe and is played by the printed book in selective education. There is moreor less effort to discredit books as educative tools and to lay emphasison oral instruction and manual training. We need not decry these, but, itmust be remembered that after all the book contains the record of man'sprogress; we may tell how to do a thing, and show how to do it, but weshall never do it in a better way or explain the why and wherefore, andsurely transmit that ability and that explanation to posterity, withoutthe aid of a stable record of some kind. If we are sure that our studentscould and would pick out only what they needed, as a wild animal picks hisfood in the woods, we might go far toward solving our problem, by simplyturning them loose in a collection of books. Some people have minds thatqualify them to profit by such "browsing, " and some of these havepractically educated themselves in a library. Even in the more commoncases where formal training is absolutely necessary, access to other booksthan text-books is an aid to selection both qualitative and quantitative. Books may serve as samples. To take an extreme case, a boy who had noknowledge whatever of the nature of law or medicine would certainly not becompetent to choose between them in selecting a profession, and a monthspent in a library where there were books on both subjects would certainlyoperate to lessen his incompetence. Probably it would not be rash toassert that with free access to books, under proper guidance, both beforeand during a course of training, the persons who begin that course willinclude more of the fit and those who finish it will include less of theunfit, than without such access. 

Let us consider one or two concrete examples. A college boy has the choiceof several different courses. He knows little of them, but thinks that onewill meet his needs. He elects it and finds too late that he is wastinghis time. Another boy, whose general reading has been sufficient to givehim some superficial knowledge of the subject-matter in all the courses, sees clearly which will benefit him, and profits by that knowledge. 

Again, a boy, full of the possibilities that would lead him to appreciatethe best in literature, has gained his knowledge of it from a teacher wholooks upon a literary masterpiece only as something to be dissected. Thestudent has been disgusted instead of inspired, and his whole life hasbeen deprived of one of the purest and most uplifting of all influences. Had he been brought up in a library where he could make literary friendsand develop literary enthusiasms, his course with the dry as dust teacherwould have been only an unpleasant incident, instead of the wrecking of apart of his intellectual life. 

Still again, a boy on a farm has vague aspirations. He knows that he wantsa broader horizon, to get away from his cramped environment--that is aboutall. How many boys, impelled by such feelings, have gone out into theworld with no clear idea of what they are fitted to do, or even what theyreally desire! To how many others has the companionship of a few booksmeant the opening of a peep-hole, thru which, dimly perhaps, but none theless really, have been descried definite possibilities, needs, andopportunities!

To all of these youths books have been selective aids merely--they haveadded little or nothing to the actual training whose extent and characterthey have served to point out. Such cases, which it would be easy tomultiply, illustrate the value of books in the selective functions oftraining. To assert that they exercise such a function is only another wayof saying that a mind orients itself by the widest contact with otherminds. There are other ways of assuring this contact, and these should notbe neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both inspace and in time. How else could we know exactly what Homer and St. Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin andWilliam James, we will say, are even now thinking?

It has scarcely been necessary to say all this to convince you of thevalue of books as aids to education; but it is certainly interesting tofind that in an examination of the selective processes in education, wemeet with our old friends in such an important role. 

A general collection of books, then, constitutes an important factor inthe selective part of an education. Where shall we place this collection?I venture to say that altho every school must have a library to aid in theformative part of its training, the library as a selective aid should belarge and central and should preferably be at the disposal of the studentnot only during the period of his formal training, but before and afterit. This points to the public library, and to close cooperation between itand the school, rather than to the expansion of the classroom library. This is, perhaps, not the place to dispute the wisdom of our Board ofEducation in developing classroom libraries, but it may be proper to putin a plea for confining them to books that bear more particularly on thesubjects of instruction. The general collection of books should be outsideof the school, because the boy is destined to spend most of his lifeoutside of the school. His education by no means ends with his graduation. The agents that operate to develop and change him will be at work so longas he lives, and it is desirable that the book should be one of these. Ifhe says good-by to the book when he leaves school, that part of histraining is likely to be at an end. If he uses, in connection with, andparallel to, his formal education a general collection of books outside ofthe school, he will continue to use it after he leaves school. And even sofar as the special classroom library is concerned, it must be evident thata large general collection of books that may be drawn upon freely is auseful supplement. For the teacher's professional use, the larger thecollection at his disposal the better. A sum of money spent by the city inimproving and making adequate the pedagogical section of its publiclibrary, particularly in the department of circulation, will be expendedto greater advantage than many times the amount devoted to a large numberof small collections on the same subjects in schools. 

These are the considerations that have governed the New York PublicLibrary in its effort to be of assistance to the teachers and pupils inthe public schools of the city. Stated formally, these efforts manifestthemselves in the following directions:

(1) The making of library use continuous from the earliest possible age, thru school life and afterwards;

(2) Cooperation with the teacher in guiding and limiting the child'sreading during the school period;

(3) Aid within the library in the preparation of school work;

(4) The supplementing of classroom libraries by the loan of books inquantity;

(5) The cultivation of personal relations between library assistants andteachers in their immediate neighborhood;

(6) The furnishing of accurate and up-to-date information to schoolsregarding the library's resources and its willingness to place them at theschool's disposal;

(7) The increase of the library's circulation collection along linessuggested and desired by teachers;

(8) The granting of special privileges to teachers and special studentswho use the library for purposes of study. 

Toward the realization of these aims three departments are nowcooperating, each of them in charge of an expert in his or her specialline of work. 

(1) The children's rooms in the various libraries, now under the directionof an expert supervisor. 

(2) The traveling library office. 

(3) The division of school work, with an assistant in each branch, underskilled headquarters superintendence. 

When our plans, which are already in good working order, are completelycarried out, we shall be able to guarantee to every child guidance in hisreading up to and thru his school course, with direction in a line ofinfluence that will make him a user of books thruout his life and createin him a feeling of attachment to the public library as the home anddispenser of books and as a permanent intellectual refuge from care, trouble, and material things in general, as well as a mine of informationon all subjects that may benefit or interest him. 

Some of the obstacles to the immediate realization of our plans in fullmay be briefly stated as follows:

(1) Lack of sufficient funds. With more money we could buy more books, payhigher salaries, and employ more persons. The assistants in charge ofchildren's rooms should be women of the highest culture and ability, andit is difficult to secure proper persons at our present salaries. Assistants in charge of school work must be persons of tact and quicknessof perception, and they should have no other work to do; whereas atpresent we are obliged to give this work to library assistants in additionto their ordinary routine duties, to avoid increasing our staff by aboutforty assistants, which our appropriation does not permit. 

(2) Misunderstanding on the part of the public, and also to some extent onthe part of teachers, of our aims, ability, and attitude. This I am gladto say is continually lessening. We can scarcely expect that each of ourfive hundred assistants should be thoroly imbued with the spirit ofhelpfulness toward the schools or even that they should perfectlyunderstand what we desire and aim to do. Nor can we expect that our wishto aid should be appreciated by every one of fifty thousand teachers or amillion parents. This will come in time. 

(3) A low standard of honesty on the part of certain users of the library. It is somewhat disheartening to those who are laboring to do a publicservice to find that some of those whom they are striving to benefit, lookupon them merely as easy game. To prevent this and at the same time towithstand those who urge that such misuse of the library should be met bythe withdrawal of present privileges and facilities uses up energy thatmight otherwise be directed toward the improvement of our service. Now, like the intoxicated man, we sometimes refuse invitations to advancebecause it is "all we can do to stay where we are. " Here is an opportunityfor all the selective influences that we may bring to bear, andunfortunately the library can have but little part in these. 

Have I wandered too far from my theme? The good that a public library maydo, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may assumein a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which itis administered and the resources at its disposal. Its public services maybe various, but probably there is no place in which it may be of morevalue than side by side with the public school; and I venture to thinkthat this is the case largely because education to be complete must selectas well as train, must compel the fit to step forward and the unfit toretire, and must do this, not only at the outset of a course of trainingbut continuously thruout its duration. We speak of a student being "putthru the mill, " and we must not forget that a mill not only grinds andstamps into shape but also sifts and selects. A finished product of agiven grade is always such not only by virtue of formation and adaptationbut also by virtue of selection. In human training one of the most potentof these selective agencies is the individual will, and to train that willand make it effective in the right direction there is nothing better thanconstant association with the records of past aims and past achievements. This must be my excuse for saying so much of libraries in general, and ofone library in particular, in an address on what I have ventured to givethe name of Selective Education. 

THE USES OF FICTION[2]

 [2] Read before the American Library Association, Asheville Conference, May 28, 1907. 

Literature is becoming daily more of a dynamic and less of a staticphenomenon. In other days the great body of written records remained moreor less stable and with its attendant body of tradition did its work by asort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneathit--on a special class peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we haveadded to this effect that of a moving multitude of more or less ephemeralbooks, which appear, do their work, and pass on out of sight. They arelight, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and easewith which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less andless limited to a class, and more and more familiar to the masses. Thebook nowadays is in motion. Even the classics, the favorites of otherdays, have left their musty shelves and are moving out among the people. Where one man knew and loved Shakespeare a century ago, a thousand knowand love him to-day. The literary blood is circulating and in so doing isgiving life to the body politic. In thus wearing itself out the book iscreating a public appreciation that makes itself felt in a demand forreprinting, hence worthy books are surer of perpetuation in this swirlingcurrent than they were in the old time reservoir. But besides these bookswhose literary life is continuous, though their paper and binding may wearout, there are other books that vanish utterly. By the time that thematerial part of them needs renewing, the book itself has done its work. Its value at that moment is not enough, or is not sufficientlyappreciated, to warrant reprinting. It drops out of sight and its place istaken by another, fresh from the press. This part of our moving literatureis what is called ephemeral, and properly so; but no stigma necessarilyattaches to the name. In the first place, it is impossible to draw a linebetween the ephemeral and the durable. "One storm in the world's historyhas never cleared off, " said the wit--"the one we are having now. " Yet theconditions of to-day, literary as well as meteorological, are notnecessarily lasting. 

We are accustomed to regard what we call standard literature asnecessarily the standard of innumerable centuries to come, forgetful ofthe fact that other so-called standards have "had their day and ceased tobe. " Some literature lasts a century, some a year, some a week; whereshall we draw the line below which all must be condemned as ephemeral? Isit not possible that all literary work that quickly achieves a usefulpurpose and having achieved it passes at once out of sight, may reallycount for as much as one that takes the course of years to produce itsslow results? The most ephemeral of all our literary productions--thedaily paper--is incalculably the most influential, and its influencelargely depends on this dynamic quality that has been noted--thepenetrative power of a thing of light weight moving at a high speed. Andthis penetrative power effective literature must have to-day on account ofthe vastly increased mass of modern readers. 

Reading is no longer confined to a class, it is well-nigh universal, inour own country, at least. And the habit of mind of the thoughtful andintent reader is not an affair of one generation but of many. New readersare young readers, and they have the characteristics of intellectualyouth. 

Narrative--the recapitulation of one's own or someone else's experience, the telling of a story--is the earliest form in which artistic effort ofany kind is appreciated. The pictorial art that appeals to the young orthe ignorant is the kind that tells a story--perhaps historical paintingon enormous canvasses, perhaps the small genre picture, possibly somethingsymbolic or mythological; but at any rate it must embody a narrative, whether it is that of the signing of a treaty, a charge of dragoons, adeclaration of love or the feeding of chickens. The same is true of music. The popular song tells something, almost without exception. Even ininstrumental music, outside of dance rhythms, whose suggestion of thedelights of bodily motion is a reason of their popularity, the beginnerlikes program music of some kind, or at least its suggestion. So it is inliterature. With those who are intellectually young, whether young inyears or not, the narrative form of expression is all in all. It is, ofcourse, in all the arts, a most important mode, even in advanced stages ofdevelopment. We shall never be able to do without narrative in painting, sculpture, music and poetry; but wherever, in a given community, thepreference for this form of expression in any art is excessive, we may besure that appreciation of that form of art is newly aroused. This is aninteresting symptom and a good sign. To be sure, apparent intellectualyouth may be the result of intellectual decadence; there is a second aswell as a first childhood, but it is not difficult to distinguish betweenthem. In general, if a large proportion of those in a community who liketo look at pictures, prefer such as "tell a story, " this fact, if thenumber of the appreciative is at the same time increasing, means a newlystimulated interest in art. And similarly, if a large proportion of thosepersons who enjoy reading prefer the narrative forms of literature, whileat the same time their total numbers are on the increase, this surelyindicates a newly aroused interest in books. And this is precisely thesituation in which we find ourselves to-day. A very large proportion ofthe literature that we circulate is in narrative form--how large aproportion I daresay few of us realize. Not only all the fiction, adultand juvenile, but all the history, biography and travel, a largeproportion of literature and periodicals, some of the sciences, includingall reports of original research, and a lesser proportion of the arts, philosophy and religion, are in this form. It may be interesting toestimate the percentage of narrative circulated by a large public library, and I have attempted this in the case of the New York public library forthe year ending July 1, 1906. 

 Class Per cent. Estimated per Fiction cent. Of narrative Juvenile 26 Adult 32 . .. .. .. .. .. 58 58 History . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 6 6 Biography . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 3 3 Travel . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 3 3 Literature . .. .. .. .. .. .. . 7 3 Periodicals . .. .. .. .. .. .. 4 2 Sciences . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 9 3 Arts . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 3 1 Philos. & Relig. . .. .. .. . 2 1 Foreign . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 5 4 --- -- 100 84

In other words, if my estimates are not too much out of the way--and Ihave tried to be conservative--only 16 per cent. Of our whole circulation, and 38 per cent. Of our non-fiction, is non-narrative, despite the factthat our total fiction percentage is low. 

I attach little importance in this regard to any distinction between trueand fictitious narrative, people who read novels do not enjoy them simplybecause the subject matter is untrue. They enjoy the books because theyare interesting. In fact, in most good fiction, little beside the actualsequence of the events in the plot and the names of the characters isuntrue. The delineation of character, the descriptions of places andevents and the statements of fact are intended to be true, and the furtherthey depart from truth the less enjoyable they are. Indeed, when one looksclosely into the matter, the dividing line between what we call truth andfiction in narrative grows more and more hazy. 

In pictorial art we do not attempt to make it at all. Our museums do notclassify their pictures into true and imaginary. Our novels contain somuch truth and our other narrative works so much fiction, that it isalmost as difficult to draw the line in the literary as it is in thepictorial arts. And in any case objections to a work of fiction, as wellas commendations, must be based on considerations apart from thisclassification. 

To represent a fictitious story as real or an imaginary portrait as a trueone is, of course, a fault, but the story and the portrait may both be ofthe highest excellence when the subjects are wholly imaginary. It shouldbe noted that the crime of false representation, when committed withsuccess, removes a work from library classification as fiction and placesit in one of the other classes. Indeed, it is probable that much morelasting harm is done by false non-fiction than by fiction. The reader, provided he uses literature temperately, has much less need to beware ofthe novel, which he reads frankly for entertainment, than of the historyfull of "things that are not so, " of the biased biography, of science"popularized" out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories insociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading asphilosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers andpseudo-naturalists. 

In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate. One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result isthe same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction. One maythus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics--themathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he doesexist--and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent isthat fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have to warnthe reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any morethan we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears, or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fictionhas the fatal gift of being too entertaining. The novel-writer must beinteresting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not oftenregard it as necessary--unless he happens to be a Frenchman. 

But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submitthat the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least inso far as he deals with the adult reader. We furnish parks and playgroundsfor our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful, but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess--that a manmay not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrelsthat he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent insupporting his family. So in the library we may and do see that harmfulliterature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books whichare not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess. 

I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude aboutthe large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises fromour misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon theattention in a state of society where public education and public tasteare on the increase. In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven indifferent departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities;so that discrepancies frequently present themselves. We may observe, forinstance, a quietly and tastefully dressed woman reading, we will say, Laura Jean Libbey. We are disconcerted, and the effect is depressing. Butthe discrepancy may arise in either of two ways. If we have here a personformerly possessing good taste both in dress and reading, whose taste inthe latter regard has deteriorated, we certainly have cause for sadness;but if, as is much more likely, we have one who had formerly bad taste ofboth kinds and whose taste in dress has improved, we should ratherrejoice. The argument is the same whether the change has taken place inthe same generation or in more than one. Our masses are moving upward andthe progress along the more material lines is often more rapid than inmatters of the intellect. Or, on the contrary, intellectual progress maybe in advance of manners. Such discrepancies are frequently commented uponby foreign travelers in the United States, who almost invariablymisinterpret them in the same way. Can we blame them, when we make thesame mistake ourselves? M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book "EnAmerique, " notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educatedpersons among us. He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of acertain clergyman. His thought is evidently, "How shocking that aclergyman should act in this way!" But we might also put it: "Howadmirable that professional education in this country is so easilyobtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it!How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed indoing so!" These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorseneither of them. But when I find that on the upper west side of New York, where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives anddaughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale ofliving is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I donot say, as I am tempted to do "How surprising and how discouraging thatpersons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, andthat not of the highest grade!" I say rather: "What an evidence it is ofour great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mentaldevelopment, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature, are living in such comfort or even luxury!"

Is not this the right way to look at it? I confess that I can see noreason for despairing of the American people because it reads more fictionthan it used to read, so long as this is for the same reason that a tenyear old boy reads more stories than a baby. Intellectual youth is atleast an advance over mental infancy so long as it is first childhood--notsecond. It is undoubtedly our duty, as it is our pleasure, to help thesepeople to grow, but we cannot force them, and should not try. Completegrowth may take several generations. And even when full stature has beenobtained, literature in its narrative modes, though not so exclusively asnow, will still be loved and read. Romance will always serve as thedessert in the feast of reason--and we should recollect that sugar is nowhighly regarded as a food. It is a producer of energy in easily availableform, and, thinking on some such novels as "Uncle Tom, " "Die Waffennieder" and shall we say "The jungle"? we realize that this thing is aparable, which the despiser of fiction may well read as he runs. 

THE VALUE OF ASSOCIATION[3]

 [3] An address delivered before the Library Associations of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio, October 9-18, 1907. 

Man is a gregarious animal; he cannot think, act, or even exist except incertain relations to others of his kind. For a complete description ofthose relations we must go to a treatise on sociology; our present subjectis a very brief consideration of certain groups of individuals, natural orvoluntary, and the application of the laws that govern such groups to thevoluntary associations with which we are all familiar in library work. Menhave joined together to effect certain things that they could notaccomplish singly, ever since two savages found that they could lift aheavy log or stone together, when neither one could manage it alone. Untilrecently the psychology of human groups has received little study. Le Bon, in his book on "The Crowd, " gives the modern treatment of it. A group ofpersons does not think and act precisely as each of its componentindividuals would think or act. The very act of association, loose as itmay be, introduces a new factor. Even the two savages lifting the log donot work together precisely as either would have worked singly. Theirco-operation affects their activity; and both thought and action maylikewise be affected in larger groupings even by the mere proximity of theindividuals of the group, where there is no stronger bond. 

But although the spirit that collectively animates a group of men cannotbe calculated by taking an arithmetical sum, it does depend on thatpossessed by each individual in the group, and more particularly on whatis common to them all and on the nature of the bonds that connect them. Even a chance group of persons previously unconnected and unrelated isbound together by feelings common to all humanity and may be appealed tocollectively on such grounds. The haphazard street crowd thrills withhorror at the sight of a baby toddling in front of a trolley-car andshouts with joy when the motorman stops just in time. But the same crowd, if composed of newly-arrived Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, would failutterly to respond to some patriotic appeal that might move an Americancrowd profoundly. You may sway a Methodist congregation with a tale ofJohn Wesley that would leave Presbyterians or Episcopalians cold. Try aYale mob with "Boola" and then play the same tune at Princeton, and watchthe effect. 

Thus, the more carefully our group is selected the more particular anddefinite are the motives that we can bring to bear in it, and the morepowerful will its activities be along its own special lines. The mob inthe street may be roused by working on elemental passions--so roused itwill kill or burn, but you cannot excite in it enthusiasm for Dante'sInferno, or induce it to contribute money or labor toward the preparationof a new annotated edition. To get such enthusiasm and stimulate suchaction you must work upon a body of men selected and brought together forthis very purpose. 

Besides this, we must draw a distinction between natural and artificialgroups. The group brought together by natural causes and not by man'scontriving is generally lower in the scale of civilization when it actscollectively than any one of its components. This is the case with a mob, a tribe, even a municipal group. But an artificial or selected group, where the grouping is for a purpose and has been specially effected withthat end in view may act more intelligently, and be, so far as its specialactivities are concerned, more advanced in the scale of progress than itscomponents as individuals. There is the same difference as between a man'shand and a delicate tool. The former is the result of physical evolutiononly; the latter of evolution into which the brain of man has entered as afactor. The tool is not as good for "all round" use as the hand; but toaccomplish its particular object it is immeasurably superior. 

If, then, we are to accomplish anything by taking advantage of the verypeculiar crowd or group psychology--owing to which a collected body of menmay feel as a group and act as a group, differently from the way in whichany one of its components would feel or act--we must see that our group isproperly selected and constituted. This does not mean that we are to goabout and choose individuals, one by one, by the exercise of personaljudgment. Such a method is generally inferior and unnecessary. If wedesire to separate the fine from the coarse grains in a sand-pile we donot set to work with a microscope to measure them, grain by grain; we usea sieve. The sieve will not do to separate iron filings from copperfilings of exactly the same size, but here a magnet will do the business. And so separation or selection can almost always be accomplished bychoosing an agency adapted to the conditions; and such agencies often actautomatically without the intervention of the human will. In a voluntaryassociation formed to accomplish a definite purpose we have aself-selected group. Such a body may be freely open to the public, as allour library clubs and associations practically are; yet it is stillselective, for no one would care to join it who is not in some wayinterested in its objects. On the other hand, the qualifications formembership may be numerous and rigid, in which case the selection is morelimited. The ideal of efficiency in an association is probably reachedwhen the body is formed for a single definite purpose and the terms ofadmission are so arranged that each of its members is eager above allthings to achieve its end and is specially competent to work for it, thepurpose of the grouping being merely to attain the object more surely, thoroughly and rapidly. A good example is a thoroughly trained militaryorganization, all of whose members are enthusiastic in the cause for whichthe body is fighting--a band of patriots, we will say--or perhaps a bandof brigands, for what we have been saying applies to evil as well as togood associations. The most efficient of such bodies may be verytemporary, as when three persons, meeting by chance, unite to help eachother over a wall that none of them could scale by himself, and, havingreached the other side, separate again. The more clearly cut and definitethe purpose the less the necessity of retaining the association after itsaccomplishment. The more efficient the association the sooner its aims areaccomplished and the sooner it is disbanded. Such groups or bodies, bytheir very nature are affairs of small detail and not of large andcomprehensive purpose. As they broaden out into catholicity theynecessarily lose in efficiency. And even when they are accomplishing theiraims satisfactorily the very largeness of those aims, the absence of sharpoutline and clear definition, frequently gives rise to complaint. I knowof clubs and associations that are doing an immense amount of good, insome cases altering for the better the whole intellectual or moral tone ofa community, but that are the objects of criticism because they do not actin matters of detail. 

"Why don't they do something?" is the constant cry. And "doing something, "as you may presently discover, is carrying on some small definite, relatively unimportant activity that is capable of clear description andeasily fixes the attention, while the greater services, to the public andto the individual, of the association's quiet influences pass unnoticed. The church that has driven out of business one corner-saloon gets morepraise than the one that has made better men and women of a wholegeneration in one neighborhood; the police force that catches onesensational murderer is more applauded than the one that has made life andproperty safe for years in its community by quiet, firm pressure. 

There is no reason of course, why the broader and the more definiteactivities may not be united, to some degree, in one organization. Eithersmaller groups with related aims may federate for the larger purpose, orthe larger may itself be the primary group, and may subdivide intosections each with its specified object. Both these plans or a combinationof the two may be seen in many of our large organizations, and it is thiscombination that seems finally to have been selected as the proper form ofunion for the libraries and the librarians of the United States. We have alarge organization which, as it has grown more and more unwieldy, has beensubdivided into smaller specialized sections without losing its continuityfor its broader and perhaps vaguer work. At the same time, specializedbodies with related aims have been partially or wholly absorbed, until, byprocesses partly of subdivision and partly of accretion, we have a bodycapable of dealing alike with the general and the special problems oflibrary work. It should not be forgotten, however, that its success indealing with both kinds of problems is still conditioned by the lawsalready laid down. The general association, as it grows larger, will bemarked less and less by the enthusiasm of the specialist, will be less andless efficient, will move more slowly, will deliver its opinions withreticence and will hesitate to act upon them. The smaller constituentbodies will be affected by none of these drawbacks, but their purposesappeal to the few and their actions, though more energetic, will oftenseem to the majority of the larger group devoid of meaning. This is, ofcourse, the case with the National Educational Association, the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science, and hosts of similar bodieshere and abroad. To state the difficulty is merely to confess that allattempts hitherto have failed to form a group that is at oncecomprehensive, powerful and efficient, both in the larger matters withwhich it deals and in details. 

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

The constitution of the association says that "Any person or institutionengaged in library work may become a member by paying the annual dues, andothers after election by the executive board. " We have thus two classes ofmembers, those by their own choice and those by election. The annual listsof members do not record the distinction, but among those in the latestlist we find 24 booksellers, 17 publishers, 5 editors, 9 school andcollege officials, 8 government employees not in libraries, and 24 wivesand relatives of other members, while in the case of 132 persons noqualification is stated in the list. We have or have had as ourassociates, settlement workers, lawyers, lecturers, indexers, binders, andso on almost indefinitely. Our membership is thus freely open tolibrarians, interpreting this word very broadly, and to any others that wemay desire to have with us, which means, practically, any who havesufficient interest in library work to come to the meetings. We must, therefore, be classed with what may be called the "open" as opposed to the"closed" professional or technical associations. The difference may beemphasized by a reference to two well-known New York clubs, the Playersand the Authors. These organizations would appear by their names to becomposed respectively of actors and writers. The former, however, admitsalso to membership persons interested in the drama, which may mean littleor much, while the Authors Club, despite repeated efforts to broaden itout in the same way, has insisted on admitting none but _bona fide_authors. In advocacy of the first plan it may be said that by adopting itthe Players has secured larger membership, embracing many men of means. Its financial standing is better and it is enabled to own a fine clubhouse. On the other hand, the Authors has a small membership, and ownspractically no property, but makes up in _esprit de corps_ what it lacksin these other respects. It is another phase of the question ofspecialization that we have already considered. The larger and broaderbody has certain advantages, the smaller and more compact, certain others. We have, doubtless been right in deciding, or rather in accepting whatcircumstances seem to have decided for us, that our own association shallbe of the larger and less closely knit type, following the analogy of theNational Educational Association and the various associations for theadvancement of science, American, British and French, rather than that ofthe Society of Civil Engineers, for instance, or the various learnedacademies. Our body has thus greater general but less special influence, just as on a question of general scientific policy a petition from theAmerican association might carry greater weight, whereas on a question ofengineering it would be incomparably inferior to an opinion of the civilengineers. There is in this country, it is true, a general scientific bodyof limited membership--the National Academy of Sciences, which speaks bothon general and special questions with expert authority. In the formationof the American Library Institute it was sought to create some suchspecial body of librarians, but it is too soon to say whether or not thatexpectation is to be fulfilled. The fact remains that in the AmericanLibrary Association we are committed to very nearly the broadest plan oforganization and work that is possible. We are united only by ourconnection with library work or our interest in its success, and are thuslimited in our discussions and actions as a body to the most generalproblems that may arise in this connection, leaving the special work toour sections and affiliated societies, which are themselves somewhathampered by our size in the treatment of the particular subjects that comebefore them, inasmuch as they are not separate groups whose freedom ofaction no one can call in question. 

In illustration of the limitations of a general body of the size and scopeof our Association, I may perhaps be allowed to adduce the recentdisagreement among librarians regarding the copyright question, or ratherregarding the proper course to be followed in connection with theconference on that question called by the Librarian of Congress. It willbe remembered that this conference was semi-official and was due to thedesire of members of Congress to frame a bill that should be satisfactoryto the large number of conflicting interests involved. To this conferenceour Association was invited to send, and did send, delegates. It isobvious that if these and all the other delegates to the conference hadsimply held out for the provisions most favorable to themselves noagreement would have been possible and the objects of the conference wouldhave been defeated. Recognizing this, all the bodies and interestsrepresented worked from the beginning to secure an agreement, strivingonly that it should be such as would represent a minimum of concession onall sides. This view was shared by the delegates of this Association. Thelaw as it stood was, it is true, most favorable to libraries in itsprovisions regarding importation, and the retention of these provisionsmight have been facilitated by withdrawal from the conference andsubsequent opposition to whatever new bill might have been framed. But thedelegates assumed that they were appointed to confer, not to withdraw, andthat if the Association had desired to hold aloof from the conference thatresult would have been best attained by appointing no delegates at all. The Association's delegates accordingly joined with their fellows in thespirit of compromise to agree on such a bill as might be leastunacceptable to all, and the result was a measure slightly, but onlyslightly, less favorable to libraries than the existing law. With thepresentation of this bill to the proper committees of Congress, and aformal statement that they approved it on behalf of the Association, theduties of the delegates ended. And here begins to appear the applicabilityof this chapter from library history to what has preceded. The action ofthe delegates was officially that of the Association. But it wasdisapproved by very many members of the Association on the ground that itseemed likely to result in lessening the importation privilege oflibraries. Whether these dissidents were in a majority or not it seemedimpossible to say. The Association's legislative body, the Council, twicerefused to disapprove or instruct the delegates, thus tacitly approvingtheir action, but the dissidents asserted that the Council, in thisrespect, did not rightly reflect the opinion of the Association. The wholesituation was an instructive illustration of the difficulty of getting alarge body of general scope to act on a definite, circumscribed question, or even of ascertaining its opinion or its wishes regarding such action. Recognizing this, the dissidents properly and wisely formed a separateassociation with a single end in view--the retention of present libraryimportation privileges, and especially the defeat of the part of the billaffecting such privileges as drafted in the conference. The efforts ofthis body have been crowned with success in that the bill as reported bythe committee contains a modified provision acceptable to the dissidents. Thus a relatively small body formed for a definite purpose has quicklyaccomplished that purpose, while the objects of the larger body have beenexpressed but vaguely, and so far as they have been definitely formulatedhave failed of accomplishment. There is a lesson in this both for our ownassociation and for others. 

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

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

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

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

Commenting on this, De Rousiers goes on:

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

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

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

An interesting and satisfactory summary. There is, however, another way oflooking at it. A well-known scientific man recently expressed to me hisconviction that an "American" association of any kind is destined tofailure, whether it be of scientific men, commercial travellers orplumbers. By "American" here he meant continental in extent. There maythus be, according to this view, a successful Maine hotel-keeper'sassociation, a New York bar association, or a Pennsylvania academy of finearts, but no such body truly representative of the whole United States. Many such organizations are "American" or "National" in name only; forinstance, the "American" Academy of Sciences, which is a Bostoninstitution, or the "National" Academy of Fine Arts, which belongs to NewYork City. Many bodies have attempted to obviate this trouble by thecreation of local sections in different parts of the country, and thenewly-formed Society of Illuminating Engineers has, I understand, in mindthe organization of perfectly co-ordinate bodies in various parts of thecountry, without any attempt to create a central body having headquartersat a definite place. This is somewhat as if the American LibraryAssociation should consist of the federated state associations, perhapswith a council consisting of a single representative from each. It wouldseem to be a workable and rather attractive plan. We may remind ourselvesagain that the United States itself is the classic example of an Americanassociation, and that it has been fairly successful by adopting this verysystem. Our recognition of the necessity of local divisions in our ownassociation and of close affiliation with the various state bodies isshown by the recent resolution of the council providing for sectionalmeetings and by the presence at this and several other state meetings inthe present month of an official representative of the American LibraryAssociation. That these, or similar means of making our national bodycontinental in something more than name are necessary we may freely admit. Possibly it may take some years of experimentation, ending perhaps inappropriate constitutional revision, to hit upon the best arrangement. Toomuch centralization is bad; but there must be some centralization. We musthave our capital and our legislative and administrative machinery, as theUnited States has at Washington. For legislative purposes our Washingtonis a shifting one. It is wherever the Association may hold its annualmeeting and wherever the Council may convene in the interim. For suchadministrative and executive purposes as require a fixed location, ourWashington is for the present in Boston. Next year it may be elsewhere;but whether it shall remain there or move to some other place would seemto be a matter of small importance. Wherever it may be, it will beinaccessible to a large majority of American librarians. If immediateaccessibility is a requisite, therefore, some of its functions may andshould be divided. It may not be too much to look forward to a sectionalheadquarters in every state in the Union, related perhaps to the generalheadquarters somewhat as branch libraries to a central library, or, perhaps, carried on under the auspices of the state associations. At anyrate, it is encouraging to reflect that we are not insensible to theobstacles in the way of making our own, or any other association trulyAmerican in scope, and are experimenting toward obviating them. 

All these considerations appear to me to lead to one conclusion--the dutyof every librarian to become and remain a member of the American LibraryAssociation. I do not desire to dwell on the direct advantages thatmembership offers--these are not few, and they are sufficiently obvious. Possibly most of those who are likely to be affected by them are alreadymembers of the Association. I would recommend for consideration highergrounds than these. Instead of asking the question, "What is there in itfor me?" I should inquire, "What is there in it for other people?" Howwill it benefit the general status of library work, the general standingof librarians in the community, the influence of libraries on those whouse or ought to use them--these and a hundred other elements of progressthat are closely bound up with the success of library effort, but that maynot add to the welfare of any one individual. 

There seems to be no doubt that the answers to these questions all pointtoward increased membership. As we have chosen to work along the broaderlines and by the energy of mass rather than that of velocity--with thesledge-hammer rather than the rifle bullet--it is surely our duty to makethat mass as efficient and as impressive as possible, which means that itmust be swelled to the largest possible proportions. Large membership maybe efficient in two ways, by united weight and by pervasiveness. An armyis powerful in the first way. Ten thousand men concentrated in one spotmay strike a sledge-hammer blow and carry all before them. Yet the sameten thousand men may police a great city without even seeing one another. Scattered about on different beats they are everywhere. Every block or twoone meets a patrol and the sense of security that they give isoverwhelming. It is in this way, it seems to me, that large membership inthe American Library Association may be effective. We meet together butonce a year, and even then we do not bring out our full force. We have nointention of marching on Washington _en masse_ to secure legislation oreven of forcing our trustees to raise salaries by a general librarystrike. But if we can make it an unusual thing for a librarian not to be amember of the American Library Association; if wherever one goes he meetsour members and recognizes what they stand for, then, it seems to me, public opinion of librarians and librarianship is sure to rise. Our twosavages, who band together for a few moments to lift a log, become by thatact of association marked men among their fellows; the mere fact that theyhave intelligence enough to work together for any purpose raises themabove the general level. It is not alone that increasing numbers, strength, and influence make for the glory of the Association itself; themost successful bodies of this kind are those that exalt, not themselvesbut the professions, localities or ideals that they represent. It isbecause increasing our numbers and scattering our membership throughoutthe land will increase the influence of the library and strengthen thehands of those who work in it that I believe such increase a worthy objectof our effort. Associations and societies come and go, form and disband;they are no more immortal than the men and women that compose them. Yet anassociation, like a man, should seek to do the work that lies before itwith all its strength, and to keep that strength at its maximum ofefficiency. So doing, it may rest content that, be its accomplishmentlarge or small, its place in the history of human endeavor is worthy andsecure. 

MODERN EDUCATIONAL METHODS

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

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

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

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

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

Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity ofpotatoes to be prepared for food. Our present educational methods are agood deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole intoeither jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitraryway unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation. We aregiving in our educational institutions many degrees and many kinds oftraining without proper selection of the persons to whom the training isto be applied. Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made onarbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness. One boy's educationlasts ten years, and another's two, not because the former is fitted toprofit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens tohave money and inclination to give it to him. One young man studiesmedicine and another goes into business, not because these are the careersfor which they are specially fitted, but because one thinks that theprefix "Doctor" would look well in front of his name and the other has amaternal uncle in the dry-goods trade. 

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

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

SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES[4]

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

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

A library distributes books. So does a bookseller. The functions of thesetwo distributors, however, should differ somewhat as do those of the twoproducers of books--the author and the publisher. The author creates thesoul of the book and the publisher gives it a body. The former producesthe immaterial, possibly the eternal, part and the latter merely thematerial part. Likewise, in our distribution we librarians should laystress upon what is in the book, upon the production of the author ratherthan on that of the publisher, though we may not neglect the latter. Weare, however, eminently distributors of ideas rather than of meremerchandise, and in so far as we lay stress on the material side of thebook--important as this is--and neglect what is in it, we are but tradersin books and not librarians. 

Among many of the great distributors of ideas--the magazine, thenewspaper, the school--it is becoming increasingly difficult to find anythat do not feel what I may call an anti-civic tendency. They have come tobe supported largely by other agencies than the public, and they arenaturally controlled by those agencies. As for the public, it has becomeaccustomed to paying less than cost for what it gets along these lines, and is thus becoming intellectually pauperized. It is no more possible todistribute ideas at a profit, as a commercial venture, nowadays, than itwould have been to run a circus, with an admission fee, in Imperial Rome. Thus a literary magazine is possible only because it is owned by somepublisher who uses it as an advertising medium. He can afford to sell itto the public for less than cost; the public would leave a publicationsold at a fair profit severely alone, hence such a venture is impossible. A scientific magazine in like manner must have some one to back it--a firmof patent-office brokers or a scientific society. The daily papers dependalmost wholly on their advertisements; the public would not buy a simplecompilation of the day's news at a fair profit. Even our greatinstitutions of higher education give their students more than the latterpay for; the student is getting part of his tuition for nothing. A collegethat depends wholly on tuition fees for its support is soon left withoutstudents. Thus all these disseminators of ideas are not dependent on thepersons to whom they distribute those ideas, for whose interest it is thatthe ideas shall be good and true and selected with discrimination. Theydepend rather for support on outside bodies of various kinds and so tendto be controlled by them--bodies whose interests do not necessarilycoincide with those of the public. This is not true of material things. Their distributors still strive to please the public, for it is by thepublic that they are supported. If the public wants raspberry jam, raspberry jam it gets; and if, being aroused, it demands that this shallbe made out of raspberries instead of apples, dock-seeds and aniline, itultimately has its way. But if the department store were controlled bysome outside agency, benevolent or otherwise, which partly supported itand enabled it to sell its wares below cost, then if this controllingagency willed that we should eat dock-seeds and aniline--dock-seeds andaniline we should doubtless eat. 

Not that the controlling powers in all these instances are necessarilymalevolent. The publisher who owns a literary magazine may honestly desirethat it shall be fearlessly impartial. The learned body that runs ascientific periodical may be willing to admit to its pages a defense of athesis that it has condemned in one of its meetings; the page-advertiserin a great daily may be able to see his pet policy attacked in itseditorial columns without yielding to the temptation to bring pressure tobear; the creator of an endowed university may view with equanimity anattack by one of its professors on the methods by which he amassed hiswealth. All these things may be; we know in fact that they have been andthat they are. But unfortunately we all know of cases where the effect ofoutside control has been quite the contrary. The government of abenevolent despot, we are told, would be ideal; but alas! rules for makinga despot benevolent and for ensuring that he and his successors shallremain so, are not yet formulated. We have fallen back on the plan offighting off the despot--good though he may possibly be; would that wecould also abolish the non-civic control of the disseminators of ideas!

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

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

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

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

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

For the present then, this independence of the library as a distributormay be regarded as one of its chief economic advantages. Another is itspower as a leveler, and hence as an adjunct of democracy. Democracy is aresult, not a cause, of equality. It is natural in a community whosemembers resemble each other in ability, modes of thought and mentaldevelopment, just as it is unthinkable where great natural differencesracial or otherwise, exist. If we wish to preserve democracy, therefore, we must first maintain our community on something like a level. And wemust level it up, not down; for although a form of democracy may existtemporarily among individuals equally ignorant or degraded, the advent ofa single person more advanced in the scale of ability, quickly transformsit into absolutism. Similar inequalities may result in an aristocraticrégime. The reason why England, with its ancient aristocracy, on thewhole, is so democratic, is that its commoners are constantly recruited bythe younger sons of its nobility, so that the whole body politic iscontinually stirred and kept more homogeneous than on the continent, whereall of a noble's sons and daughters are themselves noble. This stirring orlevelling process may be effected in many ways and along many lines, butin no way better than by popular education, as we have well understood inthis country. This is why our educational system is a bulwark of our formof government, and this is why the public library--the only continuousfeature of that system, exercising its influence from earliest childhoodto most advanced age--is worth to the community whatever it may cost inits most improved form. There are enough influences at work to segregateclasses in our country, and they come to us ready-made from othercountries; we may be thankful that the public library is helping to makeAmericans of our immigrants and to make uniformly cultivated andwell-informed Americans of us all. 

Another interesting light on the functions of the printed page, and henceof the library, is shown by the recent biological theory that connects thephenomena of heredity with those of habit and memory. The inheritance ofancestral characteristics, according to this view, may be described asracial memory. To illustrate, we may take an interesting study of a familyof Danish athletes, recently made and published in France. The members ofthis family, adults and children, men and women, have all been gymnastsfor over three hundred years--no one of them would think of adopting anyother means of gaining a livelihood. It seems certain to the scientificmen who have been conducting the investigation, that not only the physicalability to become an acrobat, but also the mental qualities thatcontribute so much to success in this occupation--pride in the acrobaticpre-eminence of the family, courage, love of applause, and so on--havebeen handed down from one generation to another, and that it has cost eachgeneration less time and effort to acquire its skill than its predecessor. In other words, we are told, members of this family are born with certainpredispositions--latent ancestral memories, we may say, of the occupationsof previous generations. To make these effective, it is necessary only toawaken them, and this may be done simply by the sight of other personsperforming gymnastic feats. These they learn in weeks, where others, without such ancestral memories, would require months or years. 

Evidently this may be applied much more widely than to mere physicalskill. Few of us can boast of gymnastic ancestry, but all of us haveinherited predispositions and have ancestral memories that make it easierfor us to learn certain things and to choose certain courses than weshould find it without them. Some of these are good; some bad. Some areuseful; some injurious. It is necessary only to awaken them to set going atrain of consequences; if not awakened, they may remain permanentlydormant. How important, therefore, are the suggestions that may serve assuch awakeners; how necessary to bring forward the useful, and to banishthe injurious ones!

Now of all possible agencies that may bring these predispositions intoplay--that may awaken our ancestral memories, if you choose to adopt thistheory--I submit that the book stands at the very head. For it is itself aracial record; it may contain, in the form best suited to awaken ourpredispositions, the very material which, long ages ago, was instrumentalin handing those predispositions down to us. It is in tune with our latentmemories, and it may set them vibrating more vigorously than any merelycontemporary agency. 

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

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

On the other hand, does this not explain much that has always interestedthe librarian; for instance, the vast popularity of fairy tales, especially those that date back to our racial infancy? I need dwell nofurther on the economic importance of the book as viewed from thisstandpoint. 

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

Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended therelations between the tonic and the dominant chords? I have heard a smallboy at a piano play these alternately for hours. Such a performance istorture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it isnew and has just come into his sphere of creative power. When he isthoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandonsit for something newer and a little higher. The boy who discovers, withoutbeing told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces acertain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par withWagner's searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that areoften beyond technical explanation. 

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

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

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

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

This is why I rejoice when a new library is opened. I thank God for itsgenerous donor. I clasp hands with the far-reaching municipality thataccepts and supports it. I wish good luck to the librarians who are tocare for it and give it dynamic force; I congratulate the public whoseprivilege it is to use it and to profit by it. 

SIMON NEWCOMB: AMERICA'S FOREMOST ASTRONOMER

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

Best and most widely known as an astronomer, his achievements in thatscience were not suited for sensational exploitation. He discovered noapple-orchards on the moon, neither did he dispute regarding the railwayson the planet Venus. His aim was to make still more exact our knowledge ofthe motions of the bodies constituting what we call the solar system, andhis labors toward this end, begun more than thirty years ago, he continuedalmost until the day of his death. Conscious that his span of life wasmeasured by months and in the grip of what he knew to be a fatal disease, he yet exerted himself with all his remaining energy to complete hismonumental work on the motion of the moon, and succeeded in bringing it toan end before the final summons came. His last days thus had in them acast of the heroic, not less than if, as the commander of a torpedoedbattleship, he had gone down with her, or than if he had fallen chargingat the head of a forlorn hope. It is pleasant to think that such a man waslaid to rest with military honors. The accident that he was a retiredprofessor in the United States Navy may have been the immediate cause ofthis, but its appropriateness lies deeper. 

Newcomb saw the light not under the Stars and Stripes, but in Nova Scotia, where he was born, at the town of Wallace on March 12, 1835. His father, ateacher, was of American descent, his ancestors having settled in Canadain 1761. After studying with his father and teaching for some little timein his native province he came to the United States while yet a boy ofeighteen, and while teaching in Maryland in 1854-'56 was so fortunate asto attract, by his mathematical ability, the attention of two eminentAmerican scientific men, Joseph Henry and Julius Hilgard, who secured himan appointment as computer on the Nautical Almanac. The date of this was1857, and Newcomb had thus, at his death, been in Government employ forfifty-two years. As the work of the almanac was then carried on inCambridge, Mass. , he was enabled to enter the Lawrence Scientific Schoolof Harvard University, where he graduated in 1858 and where he pursuedgraduate studies for three years longer. On their completion in 1861 hewas appointed a professor of mathematics in the United States Navy, whichoffice he held till his death. This appointment, made when he wastwenty-six years old, --scarcely more than a boy, --is a striking testimonyto his remarkable ability as a mathematician, for of practical astronomyhe still knew little. 

One of his first duties at Washington was to supervise the construction ofthe great 26-inch equatorial just authorized by Congress and to plan formounting and housing it. In 1877 he became senior professor of mathematicsin the navy, and from that time until his retirement as a Rear Admiral in1897 he had charge of the Nautical Almanac office, with its large corps ofnaval and civilian assistants, in Washington and elsewhere. In 1884 healso assumed the chair of mathematics and astronomy in Johns HopkinsUniversity, Baltimore, and he had much to to do, in an advisory capacity, with the equipment of the Lick Observatory and with testing and mountingits great telescope, at that time the largest in the world. 

To enumerate his degrees, scientific honors, and medals would tire thereader. Among them were the degree of LL. D. From all the foremostuniversities, the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Londonin 1874, the great gold Huygens medal of the University of Leyden, awardedonly once in twenty years, in 1878, and the Schubert gold medal of theImperial Academy of St. Petersburg. The collection of portraits of famousastronomers at the Observatory of Pulkowa contains his picture, painted byorder of the Russian Government in 1887. He was, of course, a member ofmany scientific societies, at home and abroad, and was elected in 1869 toour own National Academy of Sciences, becoming its vice-president in 1883. In 1893 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the Instituteof France, --the first native American since Benjamin Franklin to be sochosen. Newcomb's most famous work as an astronomer, --that which gainedhim world-wide fame among his brother astronomers, --was, as has been said, too mathematical and technical to appeal to the general public among hiscountrymen, who have had to take his greatness, in this regard, on trust. They have known him at first hand chiefly as author or editor of popularworks such as his "Popular Astronomy" (1877); of his text-books onastronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; of his books onpolitical economy, which science he was accustomed to call his"recreation"; and of magazine articles on all sorts of subjects notomitting "psychical research, " which was one of the numerous by-paths intowhich he strayed. He held at one time the presidency of the AmericanSociety for Psychical Research. 

The technical nature of his work in mathematical astronomy, --his"profession, " as he called it, in distinction to his "recreations" andminor scientific amusements, --may be seen from the titles of one or two ofhis papers: "On the Secular Variations and Mutual Relations of the Orbitsof the Asteroids" (1860); "Investigation of the Orbit of Neptune, withGeneral Tables of Its Motion" (1867); "Researches on the Motion of theMoon" (1876); and so on. Of this work Professor Newcomb himself says, inhis "Reminiscences of an Astronomer" (Boston, 1903), that it all tendedtoward one result, --the solution of what he calls "the great problem ofexact astronomy, " the theoretical explanation of the observed motions ofthe heavenly bodies. 

If the universe consisted of but two bodies, --say, the sun and aplanet, --the motion would be simplicity itself; the planet would describean exact ellipse about the sun, and this orbit would never change in form, size, or position. With the addition of only one more body, the problem atonce becomes so much more difficult as to be practically insoluble;indeed, the "problem of the three bodies" has been attacked by astronomersfor years without the discovery of any general formula to express theresulting motions. For the actually existing system of many planets withtheir satellites and countless asteroids, only an approximation ispossible. The actual motions as observed and measured from year to yearare most complex. Can these be completely accounted for by the mutualattractions of the bodies, according to the law of gravitation asenunciated by Sir Isaac Newton? In Newcomb's words, "Does any world moveotherwise than as it is attracted by other worlds?" Of course, Newcomb hasnot been the only astronomer at work on this problem, but it has been hislife-work and his contributions to its solution have been very noteworthy. 

It is difficult to make the ordinary reader understand the obstacles inthe way of such a determination as this. Its two elements are, of course, the mapping out of the lines in which the bodies concerned actually domove and the calculations of the orbits in which they ought to move, ifthe accepted laws of planetary motion are true. The first involves thestudy of thousands of observations made during long years by different menin far distant lands, the discussion of their probable errors, and theirreduction to a common standard. The latter requires the use of the mostrefined methods of mathematical analysis; it is, as Newcomb says, "of acomplexity beyond the powers of ordinary conception. " In works oncelestial mechanics a single formula may fill a whole chapter. 

This problem first attracted Newcomb's attention when a young man atCambridge, when by analysis of the motions of the asteroids he showed thatthe orbits of these minor planets had not, for several hundred thousandyears past, intersected at a single point, and that they could not, therefore, have resulted, during that period, from the explosion of asingle large body, as had been supposed. 

Later, when Newcomb's investigations along this line had extended to themajor planets and their satellites, a curious anomaly in the moon's motionmade it necessary for him to look for possible observations made longbefore those hitherto recorded. The accepted tables were based onobservations extending back as far as 1750, but Newcomb, by searching thearchives of European observatories, succeeded in discovering data taken asearly as 1660, not, of course, with such an investigation as this in view, but chiefly out of pure scientific curiosity. The reduction of suchobservations, especially as the old French astronomers used apparent time, which was frequently in error by quarter of an hour or so, was a matter ofgreat difficulty. The ancient observer, having no idea of the use that wasto be made of his work, had supplied no facilities for interpreting it, and "much comparison and examination was necessary to find out what sortof an instrument was used, how the observations were made, and how theyshould be utilized for the required purpose. " The result was a vastly moreaccurate lunar theory than had formerly been obtained. 

During the period when Newcomb was working among the old papers of theParis Observatory, the city, then in possession of the Communists, wasbeset by the national forces, and his studies were made within hearing ofthe heavy siege guns, whose flash he could even see by glancing throughhis window. 

Newcomb's appointment as head of the Nautical Almanac office greatlyfacilitated his work on the various phases of this problem of planetarymotions. Their solution was here a legitimate part of the routine work ofthe office, and he had the aid of able assistants, --such men as G. W. Hill, who worked out a large part of the theory of Jupiter and Saturn, andCleveland Keith, who died in 1896, just as the final results of his workwere being combined. In connection with this work Professor Newcombstrongly advocated the unification of the world's time by the adoption ofan international meridian, and also international agreement upon a uniformsystem of data for all computations relating to the fixed stars. Theformer still hangs fire, owing to mistaken "patriotism"; the latter wasadopted at an international conference held in Paris in 1896, but after ithad been carried into effect in our own Nautical Almanac, professionaljealousies brought about a modification of the plan that relegated theimproved and modernized data to an appendix. 

Professor Newcomb's retirement from active service made the continuance ofhis great work on an adequate scale somewhat problematical, and his dataon the moon's motion were laid aside for a time until a grant from thenewly organized Carnegie Institution in 1903 enabled him to employ thenecessary assistance, and the work has since gone forward to completion. 

What is the value of such work, and why should fame be the reward of himwho pursues it successfully? Professor Newcomb himself raises thisquestion in his "Reminiscences, " and without attempting to answer itdirectly he notes that every civilized nation supports an observatory atgreat annual expense to carry on such research, besides which many othersare supported by private or corporate contributions. Evidently theconsensus of public opinion must be that the results are worth at least apart of what they cost. The question is included in the broader one of thevalue of all research in pure science. Speaking generally, the object ofthis is solely to add to the sum of human knowledge, although not seldomsome application to man's physical needs springs unexpectedly from theresulting discoveries, as in the case of the dynamo or that of wirelesstelegraphy. Possibly a more accurate description of the moon's motion isunlikely to bring forth any such application, but those who applaud theachievements of our experts in mathematical astronomy would be quick todeny that their fame rests on any such possibility. 

Passing now to Professor Newcomb's "recreation, " as he called, it, --political economy, we may note that his contributions to it werereally voluminous, consisting of papers, popular articles and severalbooks, including "The A B C of Finance" (1877) and "Principles ofPolitical Economy" (1886). Authorities in the science never really tookthese as seriously as they deserved, possibly because they regardedProfessor Newcomb as scarcely orthodox. Some of his distinctions, however, are of undoubted value and will live; for instance, that between the fundand the flux of wealth, on which he insists in his treatises on finance. As to Professor Newcomb's single excursion into fiction, a romanceentitled "His Wisdom the Defender, " it is perhaps sufficient to say that, like everything he attempted, it is at least worth notice. It is a sort ofcross between Jules Verne and Bulwer Lytton's "Coming Race. "

Professor Newcomb's mind was comprehensive in its activity. One might havethought that an intellect occupied to the last in carrying out one of themost stupendous tasks ever attempted by a mathematical astronomer wouldhave had little time or little energy left for other things; but Newcombtook his rest and pleasure in popular articles and interviews. Only ashort time before his death he published an essay on aeronautics thatattracted wide attention, drawing the conclusions that the aeroplane cannever be of much use either as a passenger-carrier or in war, but that thedirigible balloon may accomplish something within certain lines, althoughit will never put the railways and steamships out of business. Inparticular, he treated with unsparing ridicule the panic fear of an aerialinvasion that so lately seized upon our transatlantic cousins. 

Personally, Newcomb was an agreeable companion and a faithful friend. Hissuccess was due largely to his tenacity of purpose. The writer's onlypersonal contact with him came through the "Standard Dictionary, "--ofwhose definitions in physical science Newcomb had general oversight. Onone occasion he came into the office greatly dissatisfied with thedefinition that we had framed for the word "magnet. "--a conception almostimpossible to define in any logical way. We had simply enumerated theproperties of the thing, --a course which in the absence of authoritativeknowledge of their causes was the only rational procedure. But Newcomb'smind demanded a logical treatment, and though he must have seen from theoutset that this was a forlorn hope, his tenacity of purpose kept him, pencil in hand, writing and erasing alternately for an hour or more. Finally he confessed that he could do no better than the following pair ofdefinitions, --"_Magnet_, a body capable of exerting magnetic force, " and"_Magnetic Force_, the force exerted by a magnet. " With a hearty laugh atthis beautiful _circulus in definiendo_ he threw down his pencil, and theimperfect and illogical office definition was accepted. 

Logical as he was, however, he was in no sense bound by convention. Hiseconomics, as has been said, was often unorthodox, and even in hismathematical text-books he occasionally shocked the hide-bound. I wellremember an interesting discussion among members of the Yale mathematicalfaculty just after the appearance of Newcomb's text-book of geometry, inwhich he was unsparingly condemned by some because he assumed in certainelementary demonstrations that geometrical figures could be removed fromthe paper, turned over and laid down again, --the so-called "method ofsuperposition, " now generally regarded as quite allowable. Of course, afigure can be treated in this way only in imagination and for this season, probably, the method was not employed by Euclid. Its use, however, leadsalways to true results, as anyone may see; and it was quite characteristicof Professor Newcomb that he should have taken it up, not having the fearof the Greek geometers before him. 

Such was Newcomb; it will be long before American science sees his equal. Mathematical genius is like an automobile, --it is looked upon in twoopposing fashions as one has it or has it not. A noted educator not longago announced his belief that the possession of a taste for mathematics isan exact index of the general intellectual powers. Not much later, anothereminent teacher asserted that mathematical ability is an exotic, --that onemay, and often does, possess it who is in other respects practically animbecile. This is scarcely a subject in which a single illustrationdecides, but surely Newcomb's career justifies the former opinion ratherthan the latter; the amount and kind of his mental abilities along alllines seemed to run parallel to his mathematical genius, to resemble it inquantity and in kind. 

The great volumes of astronomical tables without which no astronomer maynow venture upon a computation are his best monument; yet the generalreader will longer remember, perhaps, the lucid expositor, the genialessayist, the writer of one of the most readable autobiographies of ourday. 

THE COMPANIONSHIP OF BOOKS[5]

 [5] Read before the Pacific Northwest Library Association, June, 1910. 

Are books fitted to be our companions? That depends. You and I read themwith pleasure; others do not care for them; to some the reading of anybook at all is as impossible as the perusal of a volume in Old Slavonicwould be to most of us. These people simply do not read at all. To asuggestion that he supplement his usual vacation sports by reading anovel, a New York police captain--a man with a common schooleducation--replied, "Well, I've never read a book yet, and I don't thinkI'll begin now. " Here was a man who had never read a book, who had no usefor books, and who could get along perfectly well without them. He is nota unique type. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens might as wellbe quite illiterate, so far as the use that they make of their ability toread is concerned. These persons are not all uneducated; they possess andare still acquiring much knowledge, but since leaving school they haveacquired it chiefly by personal experience and by word of mouth. Is itpossible that they are right? May it be that to read books is unnecessaryand superfluous?

There has been some effort of late to depreciate the book--to insist onits inadequacy and on the impracticality of the knowledge that it conveys. "Book-learning" has always been derided more or less by so-called"practical men". A recent series of comic pictures in the newspapers makesthis clear. It is about "Book-taught Bilkins". Bilkins tries to doeverything by a book. He raises vegetables, builds furniture, runs achicken farm, all by the directions contained in books, and meets withignominious failure. He makes himself, in fact, very ridiculous in everyinstance and thousands of readers laugh at him and his absurd books. Theyinwardly resolve, doubtless, that they will be practical and will pay noattention to books. Are they right? Is the information contained in booksalways useless and absurd, while that obtained by experience or by talkingto one's neighbor is always correct and valuable?

Many of our foremost educators are displeased with the book. They arethrowing it aside for the lecture, for laboratory work, for personalresearch and experiment. Does this mean that the book, as a tool of theteacher, will have to go?

What it all certainly does mean is that we ought to pause a minute andthink about the book, about what it does and what it can not do. Thismeans that we ought to consider a little the whole subject of written asdistinguished from spoken language. Why should we have two languages--aswe practically do--one to be interpreted by the ear and the other by theeye? Could we or should we abandon either? What are the advantages andwhat the limitations of each? We are so accustomed to looking upon theprinted page, to reading newspapers, books, and advertisements, to sendingand receiving letters, written or typewritten, that we are apt to forgetthat all this is not part of the natural order, except in the sense thatall inventions and creations of the human brain are natural. Writtenlanguage is a conscious invention of man; spoken language is adevelopment, shaped by his needs and controlled by his sense of what isfitting, but not at the outset consciously devised. 

We are apt to think of written language as simply a means of representingspoken language to the eye; but it is more than this; originally, at leastin many cases, it was not this at all. The written signs represented notsounds, but ideas themselves; if they were intended to correspond directlywith anything, it was with the rude gestures that signified ideas and hadnothing to do with their vocal expression. It was not until later thatthese written symbols came to correspond to vocal sounds and even to-daythey do so imperfectly; languages that are largely phonetic are theexception. The result is, as I have said, that we have two languages--aspoken and a written. What we call reading aloud is translation from thewritten to the spoken tongue; while writing from dictation is translationfrom the spoken to the written. When we read, as we say, "to ourselves, "we sometimes, if we are not skilful, pronounce the spoken words under ourbreath, or at least form them with our vocal organs. You all remember thestory of how the Irishman who could not read made his friend stop up hisears while reading a letter aloud, so that he might not hear it. Thisanecdote, like all good comic stories, has something in it to think about. The skilful reader does not even imagine the spoken words as he goes. Heforgets, for the moment, the spoken tongue and translates the writtenwords and phrases directly into the ideas for which they stand. A skilfulreader thus takes in the meaning of a phrase, a sentence, even of aparagraph, at a glance. Likewise the writer who sets his own thoughts downon paper need not voice them, even in imagination; he may also forget allabout the spoken tongue and spread his ideas on the page at first hand. This is not so common because one writes slower than he speaks, whereas hereads very much faster. The swift reader could not imagine that he wasspeaking the words, even if he would; the pace is too incredibly fast. 

Our written tongue, then, has come to be something of a language byitself. In some countries it has grown so out of touch with the spokentongue that the two have little to do with each other. Where only thelearned know how to read and write, the written language takes on alearned tinge; the popular spoken tongue has nothing to keep it steady andchanges rapidly and unsystematically. Where nearly all who speak thelanguage also read and write it, as in our own country, the writtentongue, even in its highest literary forms, is apt to be much morefamiliar and colloquial, but at the same time the written and the spokentongue keep closer together. Still, they never accurately correspond. Whena man "talks like a book, " or in other words, uses such language that itcould be printed word for word and appear in good literary form, werecognize that he is not talking ordinary colloquial English--not usingthe normal spoken language. On the other hand, when the speech of asouthern negro or a down-east Yankee is set down in print, as it so oftenis in the modern "dialect story, " we recognize at once that although forthe occasion this is written language, it is not normal literary English. It is most desirable that the two forms of speech shall closelycorrespond, for then the written speech gets life from the spoken and thespoken has the written for its governor and controller; but it is alsodesirable that each should retain more or less individuality, andfortunately it is almost impossible that they should not do so. 

We must not forget, therefore, that our written speech is not merely a wayof setting down our spoken speech in print. This is exactly what ourfriends the spelling reformers appear to have forgotten. The name thatthey have given to what they propose to do, indicates this clearly. When aword as written and as spoken have drifted apart, it is usually the spokenword that has changed. Reform, therefore, would be accomplished byrestoring the old spoken form. Instead of this, it is proposed to changethe written form. In other words, the two languages are to be forcedtogether by altering that one of them that is by its essence the mostimmutable. Where the written word has been corrupted as in spelling"guild" for "gild, " the adoption of the simpler spelling is a reform;otherwise, not. 

Now is the possession of two languages, a spoken and a written, anadvantage or not? With regard to the spoken tongue, the question answersitself. If we were all deaf and dumb, we could still live and carry onbusiness, but we should be badly handicapped. On the other hand, if wecould neither read nor write, we should simply be in the position of ourremote forefathers or even of many in our own day and our own land. Whatthen is the reasons for a separate written language, beyond the varietythereby secured, by the use of two senses, hearing and sight, instead ofonly one?

Evidently the chief reason is that written speech is eminently fitted forpreservation. Without the transmittal of ideas from one generation toanother, intellectual progress is impossible. Such transmittal, before theinvention of writing, was effected solely by memory. The father spoke tothe son, and he, remembering what was said, told it, in turn, to thegrandson. This is tradition, sometimes marvellously accurate, but oftenuntrustworthy. And as it is without check, there is no way of tellingwhether a given fact, so transmitted, is or is not handed down faithfully. Now we have the phonograph for preserving and accurately reproducingspoken language. If this had been invented before the introduction ofwritten language, we might never have had the latter; as it is, the devicecomes on the field too late to be a competitor with the book in more thana very limited field. For preserving particular voices, such as those ofgreat men, or for recording intonation and pronunciation, it fills a wantthat writing and printing could never supply. 

For the long preservation of ideas and their conveyance to a human mind, written speech is now the indispensable vehicle. And, as has been said, this is how man makes progress. We learn in two ways: by undergoing andreflecting on our own experiences and by reading and reflecting on thoseof others. Neither of these ways is sufficient in itself. A child boundhand and foot and confined in a dark room would not be a fit subject forinstruction, but neither would he reach a high level if placed on a desertisland far from his kind and forced to rely solely on his own experiences. The experiences of our forebears, read in the light of our own; theexperiences of our forebears, used as a starting-point from which we maymove forward to fresh fields--these we must know and appreciate if we areto make progress. This means the book and its use. 

Books may be used in three ways--for information, for recreation, forinspiration. There are some who feel inclined to rely implicitly on theinformation that is to be found in books--to believe that a book can notlie. This is an unfortunate state of mind. The word of an author set downin print is worth no more than when he gives it to us in spokenlanguage--no more and no less. There was, to be sure, a time when theprinted word implied at least care and thoughtfulness. It is still truethat the book implies somewhat more of this than the newspaper, but thedifference between the two is becoming unfortunately less. Now a wrongrecord, if it purports to be a record of facts, is worse than none at all. The man who desires to know the distance between two towns in Texas and isunable to find it in any book of reference may obtain it at the cost ofsome time and trouble; but if he finds it wrongly recorded, he accepts theresult and goes away believing a lie. If we are to use books forinformation, therefore, it is of the utmost consequence that we knowwhether the information is correct or not. A general critical evaluationof all literature, even on this score alone, without going into thequestion of literary merit, is probably beyond the possibilities, althoughit has been seriously proposed. Some partial lists we have, and a fewlists of those lists, so that we may know where to get at them. There aremany books about books, especially in certain departments of history, technology, or art, but no one place to which a man may go, before hebegins to read his book, to find out whether he may believe what he readsin it. This is a serious lack, especially as there is more than one pointof view. Books that are of high excellence as literature may not be at allaccurate. How shall the boy who hears enthusiastic praise of Prescott'shistories and who is spellbound when he reads them know that the resultsof recent investigation prove that those histories give a totallyincorrect idea of Mexico and Peru? How is the future reader of Dr. Cook'sinteresting account of the ascent of Mount McKinley to know that it hasbeen discredited? And how is he to know whether other interesting andwell-written histories and books of travel have not been similarly provedinaccurate? At present, there is no way except to go to one who knows theliterature of the subject, or to read as many other books on the subjectas can be obtained, weighing one against the other and coming to one's ownconclusions. Possibly the public library may be able to help. Mr. CharlesF. Lummis of the Los Angeles library advocates labelling books with whathe calls "Poison Labels" to warn the reader when they are inaccurate oruntrustworthy. Most librarians have hesitated a little to take so radicala step as this, not so much from unwillingness to assume the duty ofwarning the public, as from a feeling that they were not competent toundertake the critical evaluation of the whole of the literature ofspecial subjects. The librarian may know that this or that book is out ofdate or not to be depended on, but there are others about which he is notcertain or regarding which he must rely on what others tell him. And heknows that expert testimony is notoriously one-sided. It is this fear ofacting as an advocate instead of as a judge that has generally deterredthe librarian from labelling his books with notes of advice or warning. 

There is, however, no reason why the librarian should take sides in thematter. He may simply point out to the reader that there are other bookson the same subject, written from different points of view, and he maydirect attention to these, letting the reader draw his own conclusions. There is probability that the public library in the future will furnishinformation and guidance of this kind about books, more than it has donein the past. 

And here it may be noted in passing that the library is coming out of itsshell. It no longer holds itself aloof, taking good care of its books andtaking little care of the public that uses them. It is coming to realizethat the man and the book are complementary, that neither is much withoutthe other, and that to bring them together is its duty. It realizes alsothat a book is valuable, not because it is so much paper and ink andthread and leather, but because it records and preserves somebody's ideas. It is the projection of a human mind across space and across time andwhere it touches another human mind those minds have come into contactjust as truly and with as valuable results as if the bodies that held themstood face to face in actual converse. This is the miracle of writtenspeech--a miracle renewed daily in millions of places with millions ofreaders. 

We have, in the modern library, the very best way of perpetuating suchrelations as this and of ensuring that such as are preserved shall beworth preserving. When the ancients desired to make an idea carry as faras possible, they saw to the toughness and strength of the material objectconstituting the record; they cut it in stone or cast it in metal, forgetting that all matter is in a state of continual flux and change; itis the idea only that endures. Stone and metal will both one day pass awayand unless some one sees fit to copy the inscription on a fresh block ortablet, the record will be lost. It is, then, only by continual renewal ofits material basis that a record in written language can be made to last, and there is no reason why this renewal should not take place every fewyears, as well as every few centuries. There is even an advantage infrequent renewal; for this ensures that the value of the record shall bemore frequently passed upon and prevents the preservation of records thatare not worth keeping. This preservation by frequent renewal is just whatis taking place with books; we make them of perishable materials; if wewant to keep them, we reprint them; otherwise they decay and areforgotten. 

We should not forget that by this plan the reader is usually made thejudge of whether a book is worth keeping. Why do we preserve by continualreprinting Shakespeare and Scott and Tennyson and Hawthorne? Thereprinting is done by publishers as a money-making scheme. It isprofitable to them because there is a demand for those authors. If wecease to care for them and prefer unworthy writers, Shakespeare and Scottwill decay and be forgotten and the unworthy ones will be preserved. Thusa great responsibility is thrown upon readers; so far they have judgedpretty well. 

Just now, however, we are confining ourselves to the use of books forinformation; and here there is less preservation than elsewhere. Especially in science, statements and facts quickly become out of date;here it is not the old but the new that we want--the new based on theaccurate and enduring part of the old. 

Before we leave this part of the subject it may be noted that many personshave no idea of the kinds of information that may be obtained from books. Even those who would unhesitatingly seek a book for data in history, art, or mathematics would not think of going to books for facts on plumbing, weaving, or shoe-making, for methods of shop-window decoration or ofdisplay-advertising, for special forms of bookkeeping suitable forfactories or for stock-farms--for a host of facts relating to trades, occupations, and business in general. Yet there are books about all thesethings--not books perhaps to read for an idle hour, but books full of meatfor them who want just this kind of food. If Book-taught Bilkins fails, after trying to utilize what such books have taught him, it is doubtlessbecause he has previously failed to realize that books plus experience, or, to put it differently, the recorded experience of others plus our ownis better than either could be separately. And the same is true ofinformation that calls for no physical action to supplement it. Books plusthought--the thoughts of others plus our own--are more effective incombination than either could be by itself. Reading should provokethought; thought should suggest more reading, and so on, until others'thoughts and our own have become so completely amalgamated that they areour personal intellectual possessions. 

But we may not read for information at all--recreation may be what we areafter. Do not misunderstand me. Many persons have an idea that if onereads to amuse himself he must necessarily read novels. I think mosthighly of good novels. Narrative is a popular form of literary expression;it is used by those who wish to instruct as well as to amuse. One mayobtain plenty of information from novels--often in a form nowhere elseavailable. If we want exact statement, statistical or otherwise, we do notgo to fiction for it; but if we wish to obtain what is often moreimportant--accurate and lasting general impressions of history, society, or geography, the novel is often the only place where these may be had. Likewise, one may amuse himself with history, travel, science, orart--even with mathematics. The last is rarely written primarily to amuse, although we have such a title as "Mathematical recreations, " but there areplenty of non-fiction books written for entertainment and one may read forentertainment any book whatever. The result depends not so much on thebook or its contents as on the reader. 

Recreation is now recognized as an essential part of education. And justas physical recreation consists largely in the same muscular movementsthat constitute work, only in different combinations and with differentends in view, so mental recreation consists of intellectual exercise witha similar variation of combinations and aims. 

Somebody says that "play is work that you don't have to do". So readingfor amusement may closely resemble study--the only difference is that itis purely voluntary. Here again, however, the written language is only anintermediary; we have as before, the contact of two minds--only here it isoften the lighter contact of good-fellowship. And one who reads always forsuch recreation is thus like the man who is always bandying trivialities, story-telling, and jesting--an excellent, even a necessary, way of passingpart of one's time, but a mistaken way of employing all of it. 

The best kind of recreation is gently stimulating, but stimulation mayrise easily to abnormality. There are fiction drunkards just as there arepersons who take too much alcohol or too much coffee. In fact, if one isso much absorbed by the ideas that he is assimilating that the processinterferes with the ordinary duties of life, he may be fairly sure that itis injuring him. If one loves coffee or alcohol, or even candy, so dearlythat one can not give it up, it is time to stop using it altogether. If areader is so fond of an exciting story that he can not lay it aside, sothat he sits up late at night reading it, or if he can not drop it fromhis mind when he does lay it aside, but goes on thinking about the deadlycombat between the hero and Lord William Fitz Grouchy when he ought to bestudying his lessons or attending to his business, it is time to cut outfiction altogether. This advice has absolutely nothing to do with thequality of the fiction. It will not do simply to warn the habitualdrunkard that he must be careful to take none but the best brands; he mustdrop alcohol altogether. If you are a fiction drunkard, enhanced qualitywill only enslave you further. This sort of use is no more recreation inthe proper sense of the word than is gambling, or drinking to excess, orsmoking opium. 

And now we come to a use of books that is more important--lies more at theroot of things--than their use for either information or recreation--theiruse for inspiration. One may get help and inspiration along with the othertwo--reading about how to make a box may inspire a boy to go out and makeone himself. It is this kind of thing that should be the final outcome ofevery mental process. Nothing that goes on in the brain is really completeuntil it ends in a motor stimulus. The action, it is true, may not followclosely; it may be the result of years of mental adjustment; it may eventake place in another body from the one where it originated. The man whotells us how to make a box, and tells it so fascinatingly that he sets allhis readers to box-making, presumably has made boxes with his own hands, but there may be those who are fitted to inspire action in others ratherthan to undertake it themselves. And the larger literature of inspirationis not that which urges to specific deeds like box-making, or even toclasses of deeds, like caring for the sick or improving methods oftransportation; rather does it include in its scope all good thoughts andall good actions. It makes better men and women of those who read it; itis revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time, in the best sense ofboth words. 

What will thus inspire me, do you ask? It would be easy to try to tellyou; it would also be easy to fail. Many have tried and failed. This is adeeply personal matter. I can not tell what book, or what passage in abook, will touch the magic spring that shall make your life useful insteadof useless, that shall start your thoughts and your deeds climbing upinstead of grovelling or passively waiting. Only search will reveal it. The diamond-miner who expects to be directed to the precise spot where hewill find a gem will never pick one up. Only he who seeks, finds. Thereare, however, places to look and places to avoid. The peculiar clay inwhich diamonds occur is well known to mineralogists. He who runs acrossit, looks for diamonds, though he may find none. But he who hunts for themon the rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire or the sea-sands of Florida isdoing a foolish thing--although even there he may conceivably pick up onethat has been dropped by accident. 

So you may know where it is best to go in your search for inspiration frombooks, for we know where seekers in the past have most often found it. Hewho could read the Bible or Shakespeare without finding some of it is theexception. It may be looked for in the great poets--Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Hugo, Keats, Goethe; or the great historians--Tacitus, Herodotus, Froissart, Macaulay, Taine, Bancroft; or in the greattravellers from Sir John Mandeville down, or in biographies like Boswell'slife of Johnson, or in books of science--Laplace, Lagrange, Darwin, Tyndall, Helmholtz; in the lives of the great artists; in the great novelsand romances--Thackeray, Balzac, Hawthorne, Dickens, George Eliot. Yeteach and all of these may leave you cold and may pick up your gem in someout-of-the-way corner where neither you nor anyone else would think oflooking for it. 

Did you ever see a car-conductor fumbling about in the dark with thetrolley pole, trying to hit the wire? While he is pulling it down andletting it fly up again, making fruitless dabs in the air, the car is darkand motionless; in vain the motorman turns his controller, in vain do thepassengers long for light. But sooner or later the pole strikes the wire;down it flows the current that was there all the time up in the air; in ajiffy the car is in motion and ablaze with light. So your search forinspiration in literature may be long and unsuccessful; you are dark andmotionless. But the life-giving current from some great man's brain isflowing through some book not far away. One day you will make theconnection and your life will in a trice be filled with light and instinctwith action. 

And before we leave this subject of inspiration, let us dwell for a momenton that to be obtained from one's literary setting in general--from thetotality of one's literary associations and impressions, as distinguishedfrom that gained from some specific passage or idea. 

It has been said that it takes two to tell the truth; one to speak and oneto listen. In like manner we may say that two persons are necessary to agreat artistic interpretation--one to create and one to appreciate. And ofno art is this more true than it is of literature. The thought that we arethus cooperating with Shakespeare and Schiller and Hugo in bringing outthe full effect of their deathless conceptions is an inspiring one and itsconsideration may aid us in realizing the essential oneness of the humanrace, so far as its intellectual life is concerned. 

Would you rather be a citizen of the United States than, we will say, ofNicaragua? You might be as happy, as well educated, as well off, there ashere. Why do you prefer your present status? Simply and solely because ofassociations and relationships. If this is sentiment, as it doubtless is, it is the kind of sentiment that rules the world--it is in the same classas friendship, loyalty, love of kin, affection for home. The links thatbind us to the past and the threads that stretch out into the future aremore satisfactory to us here in the United States, with the complexity ofits interests for us, than they would be in Nicaragua, or Guam, orIceland. 

Then of what country in the realm of literature do you desire to be acitizen? Of the one where Shakespeare is king and where your familiar anddaily speech is with the great ones of this earth--those whose wise, witty, good, or inspiring words, spoken for centuries past, have beenrecorded in books? Or would you prefer to dwell with triviality andbanality--perhaps with Laura Jean Libbey or even with Mary J. Holmes, andthose a little better than these--or a little worse. 

I am one of those who believe in the best associations, literary as wellas social. And associations may have their effect even if they areapparently trivial or superficial. 

When the open-shelf library was first introduced we were told that one ofits chief advantages was that it encouraged "browsing"--the somewhataimless rambling about and dipping here and there into a book. Obviouslythis can not be done in a closed-shelf library. But of late it has beensuggested, in one quarter or another, that although this may be a pleasantoccupation to some, or even to most, it is not a profitable one. Opponentsof the open shelf of whom there are still one or two, here and there, findin this conclusion a reason for negativing the argument in its favor, while those of its advocates who accept this view see in it only a reasonfor basing that argument wholly on other grounds. 

Now those of us who like a thing do not relish being told that it is notgood for us. We feel that pleasure was intended as an outward sign ofbenefits received and although it may in abnormal conditions deceive us, we are right in demanding proof before distrusting its indications. Whenthe cow absorbs physical nutriment by browsing, she does so withoutfurther reason than that she likes it. Does the absorber of mental pabulumfrom books argue wrongly from similar premises?

Many things are hastily and wrongly condemned because they do not achievecertain results that they were not intended to achieve. And in particular, when a thing exists in several degrees or grades, some one of those gradesis often censured, although good in itself, because it is not a grade ortwo higher. Obviously everything depends on what is required. When ashopper wants just three yards of cloth, she would be foolish to buy four. She would, of course, be even more foolish to imagine that, if she reallywished four, three would do just as well. But if a man wants to go to theeighth story of a building, he should not be condemned because he does notmount to the ninth; if he wishes a light lunch, he should not be foundfault with for not ordering a seven-course dinner. And yet we continuallyhear persons accused of "superficiality" who purposely and knowinglyacquire some slight degree of knowledge of a subject instead of a higherdegree. And others are condemned, we will say, for reading for amusementwhen they might have read for serious information, without inquiringwhether amusement, in this instance, was not precisely what they needed. 

It may be, therefore, that browsing is productive of some good result, andthat it fails to effect some other, perhaps some higher, result which itscritics have wrongly fixed upon as the one desirable thing in thisconnection. 

When a name embodies a figure of speech, we may often learn something byfollowing up the figure to see how far it holds good. What does an animaldo, and what does it not do, when it "browses"? In the first place it eatsfood--fresh, growing food; but, secondly, it eats this food by croppingoff the tips of the herbage, not taking much at once, and again, it movesabout from place to place, eating now here and now there and then makingselection, from one motive or another, but presumably following thedictates of its own taste or fancy. What does it not do? First, it doesnot, from choice, eat anything bad. Secondly, it does not necessarilyconsume all of its food in this way. If it finds a particularly choicespot, it may confine its feeding to that spot; or, if its owner sees fit, he may remove it to the stable, where it may stand all day and eat what hechooses to give it. The benefits of browsing are, first, the nourishmentactually derived from the food taken, coupled with the fact that it istaken in small quantities, and in great variety; and secondly, theknowledge of good spots, obtained from the testing of one spot afteranother, throughout the whole broad pasture. 

Now I submit that our figure of speech holds good in all theseparticulars. The literary "browser" partakes of his mental food from booksand is thereby nourished and stimulated; he takes it here and there inbrief quantities, moving from section to section and from shelf to shelf, selecting choice morsels of literature as fancy may dictate. He does not, if he is a healthy reader, absorb voluntarily anything that will hurt him, and this method of literary absorption does not preclude other methods ofmental nourishment. He may like a book so much that he proceeds to devourit whole, or his superiors in knowledge may remove him to a place wherenecessary mental food is administered more or less forcibly. And havinggone so far with our comparison, we shall make no mistake if we go alittle further and say that the benefits of browsing to the reader aretwofold, as they are to the material feeder--the absorption of actualnutriment in his own wilful, wayward manner--a little at a time and ingreat variety; and the knowledge of good reading obtained from such a widetesting of the field. 

Are not these real benefits, and are they not desirable? I fear that ouroriginal surmise was correct and that browsing is condemned not for whatit does, but because it fails to do something that it could not beexpected to do. Of course, if one were to browse continuously he would beunable to feed in any other way. Attendance upon school or the continuousreading of any book whatever would be obviously impossible. To avoidmisunderstanding, therefore, we will agree at this point that whatever maybe said here in commendation of browsing is on condition that it beoccasional and not excessive and that the normal amount of continuousreading and study proceed together with it. 

Having settled, therefore, that browsing is a good thing when one does notoccupy ones' whole time with it, let us examine its advantages a littlemore in detail. 

First: about the mental nourishment that is absorbed in browsing; thespecific information, the appreciation of what is good, the intellectualstimulation--not that which comes from reading suggested or guided bybrowsing, but from the actual process itself. I have heard it strenuouslydenied that any such absorption occurs; the bits taken are too small, themotion of the browser is too rapid, the whole process is too desultory. Let us see. In the first place a knowledge of authors and titles and ofthe general character of their works is by no means to be despised. Iheard the other day of a presumably educated woman who betrayed in aconversation her ignorance of Omar Khayyam--not lack of acquaintance withhis works, but lack of knowledge that such a person had ever existed. Ifat some period in her life she had held in her hand a copy of "TheRubaiyat, " and had glanced at its back, without even opening it, how muchembarrassment she might have been spared! And if, in addition, she hadglanced within for just ten seconds and had discovered that he wrotepoetry in stanzas of four lines each, she would have known as much aboutOmar as do many of those who would contemptuously scoff at her ignorance. With so brief effort may we acquire literary knowledge sufficient to avoidembarrassment in ordinary conversation. Browsing in a good library, if thebrowser has a memory, will soon equip him with a wide range of knowledgeof this kind. Nor is such knowledge to be sneered at as superficial. It isall that we know, or need to know, about scores of authors. One may neverstudy higher mathematics, but it may be good for him to know that Lagrangewas a French author who wrote on analytical mechanics, that Euclid was aGreek geometer, and that Hamilton invented quaternions. All this andvastly more may be impressed on the mind by an hour in the mathematicalalcove of a library of moderate size. And it will do no harm to a boy toknow that Benvenuto Cellini wrote his autobiography, even if theinevitable perusal of the book is delayed for several years, or thatFelicia Hemans, James Thomson, and Robert Herrick wrote poetry, independently of familiarity with their works, or that "Lamia" is notsomething to eat or "As you like it" a popular novel. Information of thiskind is almost impossible to acquire from lists or from oral statement, whereas a moment's handling of a book in the concrete may fix it in themind for good and all. So far, we have not supposed that even a word ofthe contents has been read. What, now, if a sentence, a stanza, aparagraph, a page, passes into the brain through the eye? Those whomeasure literary effect by the thousand words or by the hour are making agreat mistake. The lightning flash is over in a fraction of a second, butin that time it may reveal a scene of beauty, may give the travellerwarning of the fatal precipice, or may shatter the farmer's home intokindling wood. Intellectual lightning may strike the "browser" as hestands there book in hand before the shelf. A word, a phrase, may searinto his brain--may turn the current of his whole life. And even if nosuch epoch-making words meet his eye, in how brief a time may he read, digest, appreciate, some of the gems of literature! Leigh Hunt's "Jenniekissed me" would probably take about thirty seconds; on a second readinghe would have it by heart--the joy of a life-time. How many meaty epigramswould take as long? The whole of Gray's "Elegy" is hardly beyond thebrowser's limit. 

In an editorial on the Harvard Classics in the "Chicago evening post", (April 22), we read, "the cultural tabloid has very little virtue;. .. Togain everything that a book has to give one must be submerged in it, saturated and absorbed". This is very much like saying, "there is verylittle nourishment in a sandwich; to get the full effect of a luncheon youmust eat everything on the table". It is a truism to say that you can notget everything in a book without reading all of it; but it by no meansfollows that the virtue of less than the whole is negligible. 

So much for the direct effect of what one may thus take in, bit by bit. The indirect effect is even more important. For by sampling a wholeliterature, as he does, he not only gets a bird's-eye view of it, but hefinds out what lie likes and what he dislikes; he begins to form histaste. Are you afraid that he will form it wrong? I am not. We areassuming that the library where he browses is a good one; here is nochance of evil, only a choice between different kinds of good. And even ifthe evil be there, it is astonishing how the healthy mind will let it slipand fasten eagerly on the good. Would you prefer a taste fixed by someonewho tells the browser what he ought to like? Then that is not the reader'sown taste at all, but that of his informant. We have too much of this sortof thing--too many readers without an atom of taste of their own who willsay, for instance, that they adore George Meredith, because some one hastold them that all intellectual persons do so. The man who frankly lovesGeorge Ade and can yet see nothing in Shakespeare may one day discoverShakespeare. The man who reads Shakespeare merely because he thinks heought to is hopeless. 

But what a triumph, to stand spell-bound by the art of a writer whose nameyou never heard, and then discover that he is one of the great ones of theworld! Nought is comparable to it except perhaps to pick out all byyourself in the exhibition the one picture that the experts have chosenfor the museum or to be able to say you liked olives the first time youtasted them. 

Who are your favorites? Did some one guide you to them or did you findthem yourselves? I will warrant that in many cases you discovered them andthat this is why you love them. I discovered DeQuincey's romances, Praed'spoetry, Béranger in French, Heine in German, "The Arabian nights", Molière, Irving's "Alhambra, " hundreds of others probably. I am sure thatI love them all far more than if some one had told me they were goodbooks. If I had been obliged to read them in school and pass anexamination on them, I should have hated them. The teacher who can writean examination paper on Gray's "Elegy", would, I firmly believe, cut uphis grandmother alive before the physiology class. 

And next to the author or the book that you have discovered yourself comesthe one that the discoverer himself--your boy or girl friend--tells youabout. _He_ knows a good thing--_she_ knows it! No school nonsense aboutthat; no adult misunderstanding. I found out Poe that way, and Thackeray's"Major Gahagan", and many others. 

To go back to our old illustration and consider for a moment not the bookbut the mind, the personality whose ideas it records, such associationwith books represents association with one's fellowmen in society--at areception, in school or college, at a club. Some we pass by with a nod, with some we exchange a word; sometimes there is a warm handgrasp;sometimes a long conversation. No matter what the mental contact may be, it has its effects--we are continually gaining knowledge, making newfriends, receiving fresh inspiration. The complexion of this kind of dailyassociation determines the cast of one's mind, the thoroughness of histaste, the usefulness or uselessness of what he does. A man is known bythe company he keeps, because that company forms him; he gets from it whatbecomes brain of his brain and soul of his soul. 

And no less is he formed by his mental associations with the good and thegreat of all ages whom he meets in books and who talk to him there. Morerather than less; for into a book the writer puts generally what is bestin him, laying aside the pettiness, the triviality, the downrightwickedness that may have characterized him in the flesh. 

I have often heard the comment from one who had met face to face a writerwhose work he loved--"Oh! he disappointed me so!" How disappointed mightwe be with Thackeray, with Dickens, even with Shakespeare, could we meetthem in the flesh! Now they can not disappoint us, for we know only whatthey have left on record--the best, the most enduring part, purified fromwhat is gross and earthly. 

In and among such company as this it is your privilege to live and move, almost without money and without price. Thank God for books; let them beyour friends and companions through life--for information, for recreation, but above all for inspiration. 

ATOMIC THEORIES OF ENERGY[6]

 [6] Read before the St. Louis Academy of Science. 

A theory involving some sort of a discrete or discontinuous structure ofenergy has been put forward by Prof. Max Planck of the University ofBerlin. The various aspects of this theory are discussed and elaborated bythe late M. Henri Poincaré in a paper entitled "L'Hypothèse des Quanta, "published in the _Revue Scientifique_ (Paris, Feb. 21, 1912). 

A paper in which a discontinuous or "atomic" structure of energy wassuggested was prepared by the present writer fifteen years ago but remainsunpublished for reasons that will appear later. Although he has no desireto put in a claim of priority and is well aware that failure to publishwould put any such claim out of court, it seems to him that in connectionwith present radical developments in physical theory the paper, togetherwith some correspondence relating thereto, has historical interest. Planck's theory was suggested by thermodynamical considerations. In thepaper now to be quoted the matter was approached from the standpoint of acriterion for determining the identity of two portions of matter or ofenergy. The paper is as follows:

_Some Consideration on the Identity of Definite Portions of Energy_

It has been remarked recently that physicists are now divided into twoopposing schools according to the way in which they view the subject ofenergy, some regarding it as a mere mathematical abstraction and otherslooking upon it as a physical entity, filling space and continuouslymigrating by definite paths from one place to another. It may be addedthat there are numerous factions within these two parties; for instance, not all of those who consider energy to be something more than a meremathematical expression would maintain that a given quantity of it retainsits identity just as a given quantity of matter does. In fact a closeanalysis would possibly show that opinions are graded very closely andcontinuously from a view hardly differing from that of Lagrange, whoclearly saw and freely used the mathematical considerations involvingenergy before the word had been invented or its physical meaningdeveloped, up to that stated recently in its extreme form by ProfessorOstwald, who would replace what he terms a mechanical theory of theuniverse by an "energetical" theory, and would dwell exclusively on energyas opposed to its vehicles. 

Differences of opinion of this sort very frequently reduce to differencesof definition, and in this case the meaning of the word "identity" or somesimilar word or phrase has undoubtedly much to do with the view that istaken of the matter. It may be interesting, for instance, to look for amoment at our ideas of the identity of matter and the extent to which theyare influenced by the accepted theory of its constitution. 

Very few persons would hesitate to admit that the matter that nowconstitutes the universe is identical in amount with that whichconstituted it one million years ago, and that any given portion of thatmatter is identical with an equal amount of matter that then existed, although the situations of the parts of that portion might be and probablywere widely different in the two classes. To assert this is of course avery different thing from asserting that the identity of the two portionsor any parts thereof could have been practically shown by following themduring all their changes of location or state. That cannot be done even inthe case of some simple changes that are effected in a fraction of asecond. For instance, if water from the pail A be mixed with water fromthe pail B there is no possible way of telling which pail any givenportion of the mixture came from or in what proportions, yet it is certainthat such portion is identical with a portion of equal mass that recentlyoccupied part of one or both pails. 

How far our certainty as to this is influenced by our ideas regarding theultimate constitution of the water is worthy of investigation. All whoaccept the molecular theory, for instance, will regard our inability totrace the elements of a mixture as due to purely physical limitations. Aset of Maxwell's "demons" if bidden to watch the molecules of the water inpail A, one demon being assigned to each molecule, would be able to tellus at any time the precise proportions of any given part of the mixture. But if we should not accept the molecular theory and believe for instance, that water is a continuum, absolutely homogeneous, no matter how smallportions of it be selected, then our demons would be as powerless as weourselves now are to trace the constituents in the mixture. 

We are now in a position to ask the question: Is the matter in a mixtureof two continua identical with that of its constituents? The identitycertainly seems of a different kind or degree from that which obtains inthe first case, for there is no part, however small, that was derived fromone pail alone. The mixture is something more than a mere juxtaposition ofelements each of which has retained its identity; it is now of suck naturethat no part of it is identical with any part of A alone or of B alone, nor of A+B, where the sign + denotes simple juxtaposition. It isidentical, to be sure, with a perfect mixture of certain parts of A and B, but this is simply saying that it is identical with what it is now, thatis, with itself, not with something that went before. 

Probably no one now believes that water or any other kind of matter is acontinuum, but the bearing of what has been said may be seen when weremember that this is precisely the present stage of our belief regardingenergy. 

No one, so far as I know, has ventured to suggest what may be termed amolecular theory of energy, a somewhat remarkable fact when we considerthe control now exercised over all thought in physics by moleculartheories of matter. While we now believe, for instance, that a materialbody, say a crystal, can by no possibility increase continuously in mass, but must do so step by step, the minimum mass of matter that can be addedbeing the molecule, we believe on the contrary that the energy possessedby the same body can and may increase with absolutely perfect continuity, being hampered by no such restriction. 

It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss whether we have grounds forbelief that there is such a thing as a minimum quantity, or atom, ofenergy, that does not separate into smaller parts, no matter what changesit undergoes. Suffice it to say that there appears to be no _a priori_absurdity in such an idea. At first sight both matter and energy appearnon-molecular in structure. But we have been forced to look upon thegradual growth of a crystal as a step-by-step process, and we may someday, by equally cogent considerations, be forced to regard the gradualincrease of energy of an accelerating body as also a step-by-step process, although the discontinuity is as invisible to the eye in the latter caseas in the former. 

Without following this out any farther, however, the point may be hereemphasized that it is hardly possible for one who, like the majority ofphysicists, regards matter as molecular and energy as a continuum, to holdthe same ideas regarding the identity of the two. Efforts to show thatdefinite portions of energy, like definite portions of matter, retaintheir identity have hitherto been made chiefly on the lines of ademonstration that energy travels by definite and continuous paths inspace just as matter does. This is very well, but it would appear to benecessary to supplement it with evidence to show that the linesrepresenting these paths do not form at their intersections continuousblurs that not only forbid any practical attempt at identification onemergence, but make it doubtful whether we can in any true sense call theissuing path identical with the entering one. Otherwise the identity ofenergy can be admitted to be only that kind of identity that could bepreserved by matter if its molecular structure did not exist. One who canadmit that this sort of identity is the same sort that can be preserved bymolecular matter may be able to hold the identity of energy in the presentstate of the evidence, but the present attitude of physicists would seemto show that, whether they realize the connection of the two subjects ornot, they cannot take this view. In other words, modern views of theidentity of matter seem closely connected with modern views of itsstructure, and the same connection will doubtless hold good for energy. 

Regarding the probable success of an attempt to prove that energy has a"structure" analogous to the molecular structure of matter, any predictionwould doubtless be rash just now. The writer has been unable, up to thepresent time, to disprove the proposition, but the subject is one ofcorresponding importance to that of the whole molecular theory of matterand should not be entered upon lightly. 

 * * * * *

The writer freely acknowledges at present that the illustrations in theforegoing are badly chosen and some of the statements are too strong, butit still represents essentially his ideas on the subject. No reputablescientific journal would undertake to publish it. The paper was then sentto Prof. J. Willard Gibbs of Yale, and elicited the following letter fromhim:

 "NEW HAVEN, JUNE 2, 1897. 

 "MY DEAR MR. BOSTWICK:

 "I regret that I have allowed your letter to lie so long unanswered. It was in fact not very easy to answer, and when one lays a letter aside to answer, the weeks slip away very fast. 

 "I do not think that you state the matter quite right in regard to the mixture of fluids if they were continuous. The mixing of water as I regard it would be like this, if it were continuous and not molecular. Suppose you should take strips of white and red glass and heat them until soft and twist them together. Keep on drawing them out and doubling them up and twisting them together. It would soon require a microscope to distinguish the red and white glass, which would be drawn out into thinner and thinner filaments if the matter were continuous. But it would be always only a matter of optical power to distinguish perfectly the portion of red and white glass. The stirring up of water from two pails would not really mix them but only entangle filaments from the pails. 

 "To come to the case of energy. All our ideas concerning energy seem to require that it is capable of gradual increase. Thus the energy due to velocity can increase continuously if velocity can. Since the energy is as the square of the velocity, if the velocity can only increase discontinuously by equal increments, the energy of the body will increase by unequal increments in such a way as to make the exchange of energy between bodies a very awkward matter to adjust. 

 "But apart from the question of the increase of energy by discontinuous increments, the question of relative and absolute motion makes it very hard to give a particular position to energy, since the 'energy' we speak of in any case is not one quantity but may be interpreted in a great many ways. Take the important case of two equal elastic balls. One, moving, strikes the other at rest, we say, and gives it nearly all its energy. But we have no right to call one ball at rest and we can not say (as anything absolute) which of the balls has lost and which has gained energy. If there is such a thing as absolute energy of motion it is something entirely unknowable to us. Take the solar system, supposed isolated. We may take as our origin of coordinates the center of gravity of the system. Or we may take an origin with respect to which the center of gravity of the solar system has any (constant) velocity. The kinetic energy of the earth, for example, may have any value whatever, and the principle of the conservation of energy will hold in any case for the whole solar system. But the shifting of energy from one planet to another will take place entirely differently when we estimate the energies with reference to different origins. 

 "It does not seem to me that your ideas fit in with what we know about nature. If you ask my advice, I should not advise you to try to publish them. 

 "At best you would be entering into a discussion (perhaps not in bad company) in which words would play a greater part than precise ideas. 

 "This is the way I feel about it. 

 "I remain, "Yours faithfully, "J. W. GIBBS. "

Professor Gibbs's criticism of the illustration of water-mixture isevidently just. Another might well have been used where the things mixedare not material--for instance, the value of money deposited in a bank. IfA and B each deposits $100 to C's credit and C then draws $10, there isevidently no way of determining what part of it came from A and what fromB. The structure of "value", in other words, is perfectly continuous. Professor Gibbs's objections to an "atomic" theory of the structure ofenergy are most interesting. The difficulties that it involves are notoverstated. In 1897 they made it unnecessary, but since that timeconsiderations have been brought forward, and generally recognized, whichmay make it necessary to brave those difficulties. 

Planck's theory was suggested by the apparent necessity of modifying thegenerally accepted theory of statistical equilibrium involving the socalled "law of equipartition, " enunciated first for gases and extended toliquids and solids. 

In the first place the kinetic theory fixes the number of degrees offreedom of each gaseous molecule, which would be three for argon, forinstance, and five for oxygen. But what prevents either from having thesix degrees to which ordinary mechanical theory entitles it? Furthermore, the oxygen spectrum has more than five lines, and the molecule musttherefore vibrate in more than five modes. "Why, " asks Poincaré, "docertain degrees of freedom appear to play no part here; why are they, soto speak, 'ankylosed'?" Again, suppose a system in statisticalequilibrium, each part gaining on an average, in a short time, exactly asmuch as it loses. If the system consists of molecules and ether, as theformer have a finite number of degrees of freedom and the latter aninfinite number, the unmodified law of equipartition would require thatthe ether should finally appropriate all energy, leaving none of it to thematter. To escape this conclusion we have Rayleigh's law that the radiatedenergy, for a given wave length, is proportional to the absolutetemperature, and for a given temperature is in inverse ratio to the fourthpower of the wave-length. This is found by Planck to be experimentallyunverifiable, the radiation being less for small wave-lengths and lowtemperatures, than the law requires. 

Still again, the specific heats of solids, instead of being sensiblyconstant at all temperatures, are found to diminish rapidly in the lowtemperatures now available in liquid air or hydrogen and apparently tendto disappear at absolute zero. "All takes place, " says Poincaré, "as ifthese molecules lost some of their degrees of freedom in cooling--as ifsome of their articulations froze at the limit. "

Planck attempts to explain these facts by introducing the idea of what hecalls "quanta" of energy. To quote from Poincaré's paper:

"How should we picture a radiating body? We know that a Hertz resonatorsends into the ether Hertzian waves that are identical with luminouswaves; an incandescent body must then be regarded as containing a verygreat number of tiny resonators. When the body is heated, these resonatorsacquire energy, start vibrating and consequently radiate. 

"Planck's hypothesis consists in the supposition that each of theseresonators can acquire or lose energy only by abrupt jumps, in such a waythat the store of energy that it possesses must always be a multiple of aconstant quantity, which he calls a 'quantum'--must be composed of a wholenumber of quanta. This indivisible unit, this quantum, is not the same forall resonators; it is in inverse ratio to the wave-length, so thatresonators of short period can take in energy only in large pieces, whilethose of long period can absorb or give it out by small bits. What is theresult? Great effort is necessary to agitate a short-period resonator, since this requires at least a quantity of energy equal to its quantum, which is great. The chances are, then, that these resonators will keepquiet, especially if the temperature is low, and it is for this reasonthat there is relatively little short-wave radiation in 'blackradiation'. .. The diminution of specific-heats is explained similarly:When the temperature falls, a large number of vibrators fall below theirquantum and cease to vibrate, so that the total energy diminishes fasterthan the old theories require. "

Here we have the germs of an atomic theory of energy. As Poincaré nowpoints out, the trouble is that the quanta are not constant. In his studyof the matter he notes that the work of Prof. Wilhelm Wien, of Würzburg, leads by theory to precisely the conclusion announced by Planck that if weare to hold to the accepted ideas of statistical equilibrium the energycan vary only by quanta inversely proportional to wave-length. Themechanical property of the resonators imagined by Planck is thereforeprecisely that which Wien's theory requires. If we are to suppose atoms ofenergy, therefore, they must be variable atoms. There are other objectionswhich need not be touched upon here, the whole theory being in a veryearly stage. To quote Poincaré again:

"The new conception is seductive from a certain standpoint: for some timethe tendency has been toward atomism. Matter appears to us as formed ofindivisible atoms; electricity is no longer continuous, not infinitelydivisible. It resolves itself into equally-charged electrons; we have alsonow the magneton, or atom of magnetism. From this point of view the quantaappear as _atoms_ of _energy_. Unfortunately the comparison may not bepushed to the limit; a hydrogen atom is really invariable. .. . Theelectrons preserve their individuality amid the most diverse vicissitudes, is it the same with the atoms of energy? We have, for instance, threequanta of energy in a resonator whose wave-length is 3; this passes to asecond resonator whose wave-length is 5; it now represents not 3 but 5quanta, since the quantum of the new resonator is smaller and in thetransformation the number of atoms and the size of each has changed. "

If, however, we replace the atom of energy by an "atom of action, " theseatoms may be considered equal and invariable. The whole study ofthermodynamic equilibrium has been reduced by the French mathematicalschool to a question of probability. "The probability of a continuousvariable is obtained by considering elementary independent domains ofequal probability. .. . In the classic dynamics we use, to find theseelementary domains, the theorem that two physical states of which one isthe necessary effect of the other are equally probable. In a physicalsystem if we represent by _q_ one of the generalized coordinates and by_p_ the corresponding momentum, according to Liouville's theorem thedomain [double integral]_dpdq_, considered at given instant, is invariablewith respect to the time if _p_ and _q_ vary according to Hamilton'sequations. On the other hand _p_ and _q_ may, at a given instant take allpossible values, independent of each other. Whence it follows that theelementary domain is infinitely small, of the magnitude _dpdq_. .. . The newhypothesis has for its object to restrict the variability of _p_ and _q_so that these variables will only change by jumps. .. . Thus the number ofelementary domains of probability is reduced and the extent of each isaugmented. The hypothesis of quanta of action consists in supposing thatthese domains are all equal and no longer infinitely small but finite andthat for each [double integral]_dpdq_ equals _h_, _h_ being a constant. "

Put a little less mathematically, this simply means that as energy equalsaction multiplied by frequency, the fact that the quantum of energy isproportional to the frequency (or inversely to the wave-length as statedabove) is due simply to the fact that the quantum of action is constant--areal atom. The general effect on our physical conceptions, however, is thesame: we have a purely discontinuous universe--discontinuous not only inmatter but in energy and the flow of time. M. Poincaré thus puts it: "Aphysical system is susceptible only of a finite number of distinct states;it leaps from one of these to the next without passing through anycontinuous series of intermediate states. "

He notes later:

"The universe, then, leaps suddenly from one state to another; but in theinterval it must remain immovable, and the divers instants during which itkeeps in the same state can no longer be discriminated from one another;we thus reach a conception of the discontinuous variation of time--theatom of _time_. "

I quote in conclusion, Poincaré's final remarks:

"The present state of the question is thus as follows: the old theories, which hitherto seemed to account for all the known phenomena, have metwith an unexpected obstacle. Seemingly a modification becomes necessary. Ahypothesis has presented itself to M. Planck's mind, but so strange a onethat one is tempted to seek every means of escaping it; these means, however, have been sought vainly. The new theory, however, raises a hostof difficulties, many of which are real and not simply illusions due tothe indolence of our minds, unwilling to change their modes of thought. .. . 

"Is discontinuity to reign through out the physical universe, and is itstriumph definitive? Or rather shall we find that it is but apparent andhides a series of continuous processes?. .. To try to give an opinion justnow on these questions would only be to waste ink. "

It only remains to call attention again to the fact that this conceptionof the discontinuity of energy, the acceptance of which Poincaré sayswould be "the most profound revolution that natural philosophy hasundergone since Newton" was suggested by the present writer fifteen yearsago. Its reception and serious consideration by one of the firstmathematical physicists of the world seems a sufficient justification ofits suggestion then as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. 

THE ADVERTISEMENT OF IDEAS

Writing is a device for the storage of ideas--the only device for thispurpose prior to the invention of the phonograph, and not now likely to begenerally superseded. A book consists of stored ideas; sometimes it islike a box, from which the contents must be lifted slowly and with more orless toil; sometimes like a storage battery where one only has to make theright kind of contact to get a discharge. At any rate, if we want peopleto use books or to use them more, or to use them better, or to use adifferent kind from that which they now use, we must lose sight for amoment of the material part of the book, which is only the box or the leadand acid of the storage battery, and fix our attention on the storedideas, which are what everybody wants--everybody, that is, except thosewho collect books as curiosities. The subject of this lecture is thus onlylibrary advertising, about which we have heard a good deal of late, but weshall try to confine its applications to this inner or ideal substancewhich it is our special business as librarians to purvey. And first, inconsidering the matter, it may be worth while to say a word aboutadvertising in general. Practically an advertisement is an announcement bysomebody who has something to distribute. Announcements of this kind maybe classified, it seems to me, as economic, uneconomic and illegitimate. 

The most elementary form is that of the person who tells you where you canget something that you want--a simple statement that someone is a barberor an inn-keeper, or gives music lessons, or has shoes for sale. This maybe accompanied by an effort to show that the goods offered are ofspecially good quality or have some feature that makes them particularlydesirable, either to consumers in general or to those of a certain class. This is all surely economic, so long as nothing but the truth is told. Next we have an effort not only to supply existing wants and to directthem into some particular channel, but to create a new field, to makepeople realize a lack previously not felt; in other words to make peoplewant something that they need. This may be done simply by exhibiting ordescribing the article or it may require long and skillful presentation ofthe matter. All this is still economic. But it requires only a step tocarry us across the line. Next the enthusiastic advertiser strives to makesomeone want that which he does not need. As may be seen, the line here isdifficult to determine, but this sort of advertising is surely noteconomic. So long as the thing not needed is not really injurious, however, the advertising cannot be called illegitimate. It is simplyuneconomic. The world would be better off without it, but we may look forits abolition only to the increase of good judgment and intelligence amongconsumers. When an attempt however, is made to cause a man to wantsomething that is really injurious, then the act becomes illegitimate andshould be prevented. Another class of illegitimate advertising is thatwhich would be perfectly allowable if it were truthful and becomesobjectionable only because its representations are false. It may beostensibly of any of the types noted above. 

As we have already noted, the material objects distributed by thelibrarian are valued not for their physical characteristics but for adifferent reason altogether, the fact that they contain stored ideas. Ideas which, according to some, are merely the relative positions ofmaterial particles in the brain, and which are indisputably accompaniedand conditioned by such positions, here subsist in the form of peculiarand visible arrangements of particles of printer's ink upon paper, whichare capable under certain conditions of generating in the human brainideas precisely similar to those that gave them birth. And although thebook cannot think for itself, but must merely preserve the idea intrustedto it, without change, it is vastly superior in stability to the brainthat gave it birth, so that thousands of years after that brain hasmouldered into dust it is capable of reproducing the original ideas in asecond brain where they may germinate and bear fruit. How familiar allthis is, and yet how perennially wonderful! The miracle of it issufficient excuse for this digression. 

Now books, beside this modern form of distribution by loan, are widelydistributed commercially both by loan and by sale, and especially in thelatter form advertisement is now very extensively used in connection withthe distribution. In fact we have all the different types specifiedabove--economic, uneconomic and illegitimate, both throughmisrepresentation and the harmful character of the subject matter. Thereason for all illegitimate forms of advertising is of course not a desireto misrepresent or to do harm per se, but to make money, the profit to thedistributor being proportioned to the amount of distribution done and notat all dependent on its economic value. Distribution by public officers isof course not open to this objection, nor are the distributors subject totemptation, since their compensation does not depend on the amount ofdistribution. If they are capable and interested, furthermore, they areparticularly desirous to increase the economic value of the work that theyare doing. Since this is so and since the danger of uneconomic or harmfulforms of advertising is thus reduced to a minimum, there would seem to bespecial reason why the economic forms should be employed very freely. Butthe fact is that they have been used sparingly, and by some librariansshunned altogether. 

Let us see what library advertising of the economic types may mean. In thefirst place it means telling those who want books where they may get them. This simple task is rarely performed completely or satisfactorily. It isastonishing how many inhabitants of a large town do not even know wherethe public library is. Everyone realizes this who has ever tried to find apublic library in a strange place. I once asked repeatedly of passers-byin a crowded city street a block distant from a library (in this case notarchitecturally conspicuous) before finding one who knew its whereabouts;in another city I inquired in vain of a conductor who passed the buildingevery few hours in his car. In the latter case the library was a beautifulstructure calculated to move the curiosity of a less stolid citizen. InNew York inquiry would probably cause you to reach the nearest branchlibrary, anything more remote than that being beyond the localintelligence. Sometimes I think we had better drop all our far-reachingplans for civic betterment and devote our time for a few years to causingcitizens, lettered and unlettered alike to memorize some such simpleformula as this: "There is a Public Library. It is on Blank street. We mayborrow books there, free. "

You will notice that I have inserted in this formula one item ofinformation that pertains to use, not location. For of those who know ofthe existence and location of the Public Library there are many whoseideas of its contents and their uses, and of the conditions and value ofsuch uses, are limited and crude. The advertising that succeeds inbettering this state of things is surely doing an economic service. Allthese things the self-respecting citizen should know. But beyond and aboveall this there is the final economic service of advertising--the causing aman to want that which he needs but does not yet desire. Every man, womanand child in every town and village needs books in some shape, degree, form or substance. And yet the proportion of those who desire them is yetoutrageously small, though encouragingly on the increase. Here nomemorizing of a formula, even could we compass it, could suffice. Thiskind of advertising means the realization of something lacking in a life. Is the awakening of such a realization too much for us? Are we to stand byand see our neighbors all about us awakening to the undoubted fact thatthey need telephones in their houses, and electric runabouts, andmechanical fans in hot weather, and pianolas, and new kinds of breakfastfood, while we despair of awakening them to their needs of books--quite asundoubted? Are we to admit that personal gain, which was the victoriousmotive that spurred on the commercial advertisers in these and countlessother instances, is to be counted more mighty than the desire to do aservice to our fellowmen and to fulfill the duties of our positions--whichshould spur us on?

I am not foolish enough to suppose that by placarding the fences with thewords "Books! Books!" as the patent medicine man does with "Curoline!Curoline!" we shall make any progress. The patent medicine man is right;he wants to excite curiosity and familiarize the public with the name ofhis nostrum. They all know what a book is--and alas the name is not evenunknown and mysterious--would that it were! It calls up in many mindsassociations which, if we are to be successful we must combat, overthrow, and replace by others. To many--sad it is to say it--a book is anabhorrent thing; to more still, it is a thing of absolute indifference. Tosome a book is merely a collection of things, having no ascertainablerelationships, that one is required to memorize; to others it is acollection of statements, difficult to understand, out of which themeaning must be extracted by hard study; to very few indeed does the bookappear to be what it really is--a message from another mind. People willgo to a seance and listen with thrills to the silliest stuff purporting toproceed from Plato or Daniel Webster or Abraham Lincoln, when in thePublic Library, a few blocks away are important and authentic messagesfrom those same persons, to which they have never given heed. Such amessage derives interest and significance from circumstances outsideitself. Very few books create their own atmosphere unaided. Theypresuppose a system of abilities, opinions, prejudices, likes anddislikes, intellectual connections and what not, that is little less thanappalling, if we try to follow it up. Dislike of books or indifferencetoward them is often simply the result of a lack of these things or ofsome component part of them. We must supply what is lacking if we are toarouse a desire for books in those who do not yet possess it. I say thatsuch a labor is difficult enough to interest him whose pleasure it is toessay hard tasks; it is noble enough to attract him who loves hisfellow-man; success in it is rare enough and glorious enough to stimulatehim who likes to succeed where others have failed. Advertising may be goodor bad, noble or ignoble, right or wrong, according to what is advertisedand our methods of advertising it. He who would scorn to announce thecurative powers of bottled spring-water and pink aniline dye; he whoregards it as a commonplace task to urge upon the spendthrift public thepurchase of unnecessary gloves and neckties, may well feel a thrill ofsatisfaction and of anticipation in the task of advertising ideas and ofpersuading the unheeding citizen to appropriate what he has beenaccustomed to view with indifference. 

To get at the root of the matter, let us inquire why it is that so manypersons do not care for books. We may divide them, I think, into twoclasses--those who do not care, or appear not to care for ideas at all, whether stored in books or not; and those who do care for ideas but whoeither do not easily get them out of storage or do not realize that theycan be and are stored in books. Absolute carelessness of ideas is, itseems to me, rather apparent than real. It exists only in the idiot. Thereare those to be sure that care about a very limited range of ideas; butabout some ideas they always care. 

We must, in our advertisement of ideas, bear this in mind--the necessityof offering to each that which he considers it worth his while to take. IfI were asked what is the most fundamentally interesting subject to allclasses, I should unhesitatingly reply "philosophy. " Not, perhaps, thephilosophy of the schools, but the individual philosophy that every manand woman has, and that is precisely alike in no two of us. I have heard atiny boy, looking up suddenly from his play, ask "Why do we live?" Thisand its correlative "Why do we die?" Whence come we and whither do we go?What is the universe and what are our relations to it--these questions insome form have occurred to everyone who thinks at all. They are discussedaround the stove at the corner grocery, in the logging camp, on the ranch, in clubs and at boarding-house tables. Sometimes they take a theologicalturn--free will, the origin and purpose of evil, and so on. I do notpurpose to give here a catalogue of the things in which an ordinary man isinterested, and I have said this only to remind you that his interest maybe vivid even in connection with subjects usually considered abstruse. This interest in ideas we may call the library's raw material; anythingthat tends to create it, to broaden it, to extend it to new fields and todirect it into paths that are worth while is making it possible for thelibrary to do better and wider work--is helping on its campaign ofpublicity. This establishes a web of connecting fibers between the libraryand all human activity. The man who is getting interested in his work, debaters at a labor union, students at school and college, the worker forcivic reform, the poetic dreamer--all are creating a demand for ideas thatmakes it easier for the library to advertise them. Those who object tosome of the outside work done by modern libraries should try to look atthe whole matter from this standpoint. The library is taking its place asa public utility with other public utilities. Its relations with them arebecoming more evident; the ties between them are growing stronger. As inall cases of such growth it is becoming increasingly difficult to identifythe boundaries between them, so fast and so thoroughly do the activitiesof each reach over these lines and interpenetrate those of the others. Andunless there is actual wasteful duplication of work, we need not botherabout our respective spheres. These activities are all human; they aremutually interesting and valuable. A library need be afraid of doingnothing that makes for the spread of interest in ideas, so long as it isnot neglecting its own particular work of the collection, preservation anddistribution of ideas as stored in books, and is not duplicating other'swork wastefully. 

When we observe those who are already interested in ideas, however, wefind that not all are interested in them as they are stored up in books. Some of these cannot read; their number is small with us and growingsmaller; we may safely leave the schools to deal with them. Others canread, but they do not easily apprehend ideas through print. Some of thesemust read aloud so that they may get the sound of the words, before thesereally mean anything to them. These persons need practice in reading. Theyget it now largely through the newspapers, but their number is stilllarge. A person in this condition may be intellectually somewhat advanced. He may be able to discuss single-tax with some acumen, for instance. It isa mistake to suppose that because a person understands a subject or likesa thing and is able to talk well about it, he will enjoy and appreciate abook on that subject or thing. It may be as difficult for him to get atthe meat of it as if it were a half-understood foreign tongue. You whoknow enough French to buy a pair of gloves or sufficient German to inquirethe way to the station, may tackle a novel in the original and realize atonce the hazy degree of such a persons' apprehension. He may stick to itand become an easy reader, but on the other hand your well-meant publicityefforts may place in his hands a book that will simply discourage andultimately repel him, sending him to join the army of those to whom nobooks appeal. 

Next we find those who understand how to read and to read with ease, butto whom books--at any rate certain classes of books--are not interesting. Now interest in a subject may be so great that one will wade through thedriest literature about it, but such interest belongs to the few--not tothe many. I have come to the conclusion that more readers have had theirinterest killed or lessened by books than have had it aroused orstimulated. This is a proportion that it is our business as librarians toreverse. More of this unfortunate and heart-breaking, interest-killingwork than I like to think of goes on in school. Not necessarily; for thename of those is legion who have had their eyes opened to the beauties ofliterature by good teachers. This makes it all the more maddening when wethink how many poor teachers, or good teachers with mistaken methods, orindifferent teachers, have succeeded in associating with books in theminds of their pupils simply burdensome tasks--the gloom and heaviness oflife rather than its joy and lightness. Such boys and girls will no moretouch a book after leaving school than you or I would touch a scorpionafter one had stung us. 

Perhaps it is useless to try to change this; possibly it is none of ourbusiness, though we have already seen that there are reasons to thecontrary. But we can better matters, and we are daily bettering them, byour work with children. If a child has once learned to love books and toassociate them powerfully with something else than a burdensome task, thenthe labors of the unskillful teachers will create no dislike of the bookbut only of the teacher and his methods; while those of the good teacherwill be a thousand times more fruitful than otherwise. 

So much for the ways in which interesting books are sometimes madeuninteresting. Now for the books that are uninteresting _per se_--and howmany there are! When a man has something to distribute commercially forpersonal gain, the thing that he tries above all to do is to interest hispublic--to make them want what he has to sell. His success or failure indoing this, means the success or failure of his whole enterprise. He doesnot decide what kind of an entertainment his clients ought to attend andthen try to make them go to it, or what kind of neckties they ought towear and then try to make them wear them. Of ten promoters, if nineproceeded on this principle and one on the plan of offering somethingattractive and interesting, who would succeed? It is one of the marvels ofall time that this never seems to have occurred to writers of books. Weare almost forced to conclude that they do not care whether their volumesare read or not. In only one class of books, as a rule, do the writersendeavor to interest the reader first and foremost; you all know that Irefer to fiction. What is the result? The writers of fiction are the onesread by the public. More fiction is read, as you very well know, than allthe other classes of literature put together. The library that is able toshow a fiction percentage of 60, points to it with pride, while there areplenty with percentages between 70 and 80. Now this is all to the creditof the fiction writers. I refuse to believe that their readers are anymore fundamentally interested in the subjects of which they treat than inothers. They simply follow the line of least resistance. They wantsomething interesting to read and they know from experience where to gofor it. Of course this brings on abuses. Writers use illegitimate methodsto arouse interest--appeals perhaps, to unworthy instincts. We need notdiscuss that here, but simply focus our attention on the fact that writersof fiction always try to be interesting because they must; while writersof history, travel, biography and philosophy do not usually try, becausethey think it unnecessary. This is simply a survival. It used to be truethat readers of these subjects read them because of their great antecedentinterest in them--an interest so great that interesting methods ofpresentation became unnecessary. No one cared about the masses, still lessabout what they might or might not read. Things are changed now; we aretrying to advertise stored ideas to persons unfamiliar with them and weare suddenly awakening to the fact that our stock is not all that itshould be. We need history, science and travel fascinatingly presented--atleast as interestingly as the fiction-writer presents his subjects. Thisis by no means impossible, because it has been done, in a few instances. We are by no means in the position of the Irishman who didn't know whetheror not he could play the piano, because he had never tried. Some of ourauthors have tried--and succeeded. No one after William James can say thatphilosophy cannot be made interesting to the ordinary reader. Tyndallshowed us long ago that physics could interest the unlearned, and thereare similarly interesting writers on history and travel--more perhaps inthese two classes than any other. But it remains true that the vastmajority of non-fiction books do not attract, and were not written withthe aim of attracting, the ordinary reader such as the libraries are nowtrying to reach. The result is that the fiction writers are usurping thefunctions of these uninteresting scribes and are putting history, science, economics, biology, medicine--all sorts of subjects, into fictionalform--a sufficient answer to any who may think that the subjectsthemselves, as distinguished from the manner in which they are presented, are calculated to repel the ordinary reader. Fiction is thus becoming, ifit has not already become, the sole form of literary expression, so far asthe ordinary reader is concerned. This is interesting; it justifies thelarge stock of fiction in public libraries and the large circulation ofthat stock. It does not follow that it is commendable or desirable. Forone thing it places truth and falsehood precisely on the same plane. Thescience or the economics in a good novel may be bad and that in a poornovel may be good. Then again, it dilutes the interesting matter withtriviality. It is right that those who want to know how and when and underwhat circumstances Edwin and Angelina concluded to get married should havean opportunity of doing so, but it is obviously unfair that the man wholikes the political discussions put into the mouth of Edwin's uncle, orthe clever descriptions of country-life incident to the courtship, shouldbe burdened with information of this sort, in which he has littleinterest. 

To those who are interested in the increase of non-fiction percentages Iwould therefore say: devise some means of working upon the authors. Thesegentry are yet ignorant of the existence of a special library public. Someday they will wake up, and then fiction will be relieved from the burdenthat oppresses it at present--of carrying most of the interestingphilosophy, religion, history and social science, in addition to doing itsown proper work. 

Meanwhile the librarian, who is interested in advertising ideas, must dowhat he can with his material. There is still a saving remnant ofinteresting non-fiction, and there is a goodly body of readers whoseantecedent interest in certain subjects is great enough to attract them toalmost any book on those subjects. I have purposely avoided the discussionhere of the details of library publicity, which has been well doneelsewhere; but I cannot refrain from expressing my opinion that theordinary work of the library and its stock of books if properly displayed, are more effective than any other means that can be used for the purpose. From a series of articles entitled "How to Start Libraries in Small Towns"by A. M. Pendleton, I quote the following, which appears in The LibraryJournal for May 13, 1877:

"Plant it [the library] among the people, where its presence will be seenand felt, . .. Other things being equal, it is better to have it upon thefirst floor, so that passers-by will see its goodly array of books and betempted to inspect them. "

Excellent advice; we might take it if we had not built our libraries asfar away from the street as possible and lifted them up on as high apedestal as our money would buy. Who, passing by a modern librarybuilding, branch or central, can by any possibility see through thewindows enough of the interior to tell whether it is a library rather thana postoffice, a bank, or an office?

Before moving into its new home the St. Louis Public Library occupiedtemporarily a business building having a row of six large plate-glasswindows on one side, directly on the sidewalk, enabling passers-by to seeclearly all that went on in the adult lending-delivery room. The effect onthe circulation was noteworthy. During the last months of our occupancy wewent further and utilized each of the windows for a book display. This wasin charge of a special committee of the staff, and its results were beyondexpectation. In one window we had a shelfful of current books, open toattractive pictures, with a sign reminding wayfarers that they might betaken out by cardholders and that cards were free. In another we hadstandard works, without pictures, but open at attractive pages. In anotherwe had children's books; in another, open reference or art books in adust-proof case--and so on. Each of these windows was seldom without itscontingent of gazers, and the direct effect on library circulation wasnoticed by all. At the end of the year we moved into our greatmillion-and-a-half-dollar building; and beautiful as it is--satisfactoryas are its arrangements--we have had--alas--to give up our show windows. We can, it is true, have show cases in the great entrance hall, but wewant to attract outsiders, not insiders. Some of our enthusiastic staffwant to build permanent show cases on the sidewalk. What we may possiblydo is to rent real show windows opposite. What we do not desire, is toabandon our publicity plan altogether. But when, oh when, shall we havelibraries (branches at any rate, if our main buildings must be monumental)that will throw themselves open to the public eye, luring in the wayfarerto the joys of reading, as the commercial window does to the delights ofgumdrops or neckties?

One of the greatest steps ever taken toward the advertisement of ideas wasthe adoption, on a large scale, of the open shelf. This throws the booksof a library, or many of them, open to public inspection and handling; itencourages "browsing"--the somewhat aimless rambling about and dippinghere and there into a volume. 

If we are to present ideas to our would-be readers in great variety, hoping that among them there may be toothsome bait, surely there could beno better way than this. The only trouble is that it appeals only to thosewho are already sufficiently interested in stored ideas to enter thelibrary. 

We must remember, however, that by our method of sending out books forhome use we are making a great open-shelf of the whole city. While thenumber of volumes in any one place may be small, the books are constantlychanging so that the non-reader has a good chance of seeing in hisfriend's house something that may attract him. That this may affect theuse of the library it is essential that he who sees a library book on thetable or in the hands of a fellow passenger on a car must be able torecognize its source at once, so that, if attracted, he may be led thitherby the suggestion. Nothing is better for this purpose than the libraryseal, placed on the book where all may see it; and that all may recognizeit, it should also be used wherever possible, in connection with thelibrary--on letter heads, posters, lists, pockets and cards, so that thepublic association between its display and the work of the library shallbecome strong. 

This making the whole outstanding supply of circulating books an agency inour publicity scheme for ideas is evidently more effective as the booksbetter fit and satisfy their users; for in that case we have an unpaidagent with each book. The adaptation of book to user helps ouradvertisement of ideas, and that in turn aids us in adapting book to user. When a dynamo starts, the newly arisen current makes the field strongerand that in turn increases the current. Only here we must have just alittle residual magnetism in the field magnet to start the whole process. In the library's work the residual magnetism is represented by the latentinterest in ideas that is present in every community. And I can do nobetter, in closing, than to emphasize the fact that everything thatadvertises ideas, even if totally unconnected with their recorded form inbooks, helps the library and pushes forward its work. 

Itself a product of the great extension of intellectual activity toclasses in which it was formerly bounded by narrow limits, the library isbound to widen those limits wherever they can be stretched, and everymovement of them reacts to help it. Surely advertisement on its part is anevangel--a bearing of good intellectual tidings into the darkness. We arespiritualistic mediums in the best sense--the bearers of authenticmessages from all the good and great of past or present time; only withus, no turning on of the light, no publicity however glaring, will breakthe spell or do otherwise than aid, for whether we succeed or fail, whether we live or die, those messages, recorded as they are in books, will stand while humanity remains. 

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, AND THE SOCIAL CENTER MOVEMENT[7]

 [7] Read before the National Education Association. 

The center of a geometrical figure is important, not for its size andcontent, but for its position--not for what it is in itself, but for itsrelations to the other elements of the figure. And words used with derivedmeanings are used best when their original significations are kept inmind. The business center of a city does not contain all of that city'scommercial activity; when we speak of the church as a religious center, wedo not mean that there is to be no religious activity in the home or inother walks of life; as for the center of population of a large andpopulous country, it may be out in the prairie where neither man nor hisdwellings are to be seen. All these centers are what they are because ofcertain relationships. It is so with a social center. But socialrelationships cover a wide field. The relationships of business, ofreligion, even of mere co-existence, are all social. May we have a centerfor so wide a range of activities? Even the narrower relations of businessor of religion tend to form subsidiary groups and to multiply subsidiarycenters. In a large city we may have not only a general business centerbut centers of the real estate business, of the hardware or textiletrades, and so on. Our religious affiliations condense into denominationalcenters. 

In the district of a large city where newly arrived foreign immigrantsgather, you will be shown the group of blocks where the Poles or theHungarians have segregated themselves from the rest, and even withinthese, the houses where dwell families from a particular province or evenfrom one definite city or village. Man is social but he is sociallyclannish, and the broadest is not so much he who refuses to recognizethese clan or caste relationships as he who enters into the largest numberof them--he who keeps in touch with his childhood home, has a wideacquaintance among those of his own religious faith and of his chosenbusiness or profession, keeps up his old college friendships, isinterested in collecting coins or paintings and knows all the othercollectors, is active in civic and charitable societies, takes an interestin education and educators, and so on. The social democracy that shouldsucceed in abolishing all these groups or leveling them--that shouldrecognize no relationships but the broader ones that underly all humaneffort and feeling--the touches of nature that make the whole worldkin--would be barren indeed. 

We cannot spare these fundamentals; we could not get rid of them if wewould; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do awaywith these additions would be like destroying a city to get at itsfoundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result ineconomics or aesthetics. Occupying a foremost place among these groupingsis the large division embracing our educational activities. And these aresocial not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower. Theintercourse of student with student in the school and even of reader withreader in the library, especially in such departments as the children'sroom, is so obviously that of society that we need dwell on it no further. 

This intercourse, while a necessary incident of education in the mass, isonly an incident. It is sufficiently obtrusive, however, to make itevident that any use of school or library building for social purposes isfit and proper. There is absolutely nothing new nor strange about suchuse. In places that cannot afford separate buildings for these purposes, the same edifice has often served for church, schoolhouse, public library, and as assembly room for political meetings, amateur theatricals, andjuvenile debating societies. The propriety of all this has never beenquestioned and it is difficult to see why it should not be as proper in atown of 500, 000 inhabitants as in one of 500. The incidence of the cost isa matter of detail. Why should such purely social use of these educationalbuildings--always common in small towns--have been allowed to fall intoabeyance in the larger ones? It is hard to say; but with the recent greatimprovements in construction, the building of schools and libraries thatare models of beauty, comfort, and convenience, there has arisen a notunnatural feeling in the public that all this public property should beput to fuller use. Why should children be forced to dance on the street orin some place of sordid association when comfortable and convenient hallsin library or school are closed and unoccupied? Why should the localdebating club, the mothers' meeting--nay, why should the political wardmeeting be barred out? Side by side with this trend of public opinionthere has been an awakening realization on the part of many connected withthese institutions that they themselves might benefit by such extendeduse. 

Probably this realization has come earlier and more fully to the library, because its educational function is directed so much more upon adults. Thelibrary is coming to be our great continuation school--an institution oflearning with an infinity of purely optional courses. It may open itsdoors to any form of adult social activity. 

There are forms of activity proper to a social center that require specialapparatus or equipment. These may be furnished in a building erected forthe purpose, as are the Chicago fieldhouses. Here we have swimming-pools, gymnasiums for men and for women, and all the rest of it. A branch libraryis included and some would house the school also under the same roof. Wemay have to wait long for the general adoption of such a composite socialcenter. Our immediate problem is to supply an immediate need by usingmeans directly at our disposal. And it is remarkable how many kinds ofneighborhood activity may take place in a room unprovided with any specialequipment. A brief glance over our own records for only a few months pastenables me to classify them roughly as athletic or outdoor, purely social, educational, debating, political, labor, musical, religious, charitable orcivic, and expository, besides many that defy or elude classification. 

The athletic or outdoor organizations include the various turning orgymnastic clubs and the Boy and Girl Scouts; the social organizationsembrace dancing-classes, "welfare" associations, alumni and graduate clubsof schools and colleges, and dramatic clubs; the educational, which arevery numerous, reading circles, literary clubs galore, free classes inchemistry, French, psychology, philosophy, etc. , and all suchorganizations as the Jewish Culture Club, the Young People's EthicalSociety, the Longan Parliamentary Class, and the Industrial and BusinessWomen's Educational leagues. Religious bodies are parish meetings, committees of mission boards, and such organizations as the TheosophicalSociety; charitable or civic activities include the National Conference ofDay Nurseries, the Central Council of Civic Agencies, the W. C. T. U. , playground rehearsals for the Child Welfare Exhibit, and the BusinessMen's Association; and the Advertising Men's League; musical organizationsembrace St. Paul's Musical Assembly, the Tuesday Choral Club, etc. Amongexhibitions are local affairs such as wild flower shows, an exhibit ofbird-houses, collections from the Educational Museum, the Civil League'sMunicipal Exhibit, selected screens from the Child Welfare Exhibit, andthe prize-winners from the St. Louis Art Exhibit held in the art room ofour central library. Then we have the Queen Hedwig Branch, the Clay SchoolPicnic Association, the Aero Club, the Lithuanian Club, the PhilotechneClub, the Fathers' Club, and the United Spanish War Veterans. 

I trust you will not call upon me to explain the objects of some of these, as such a demand might cause me embarrassment--not because their aims areunworthy, but because these are skilfully obscured by their names. Ifanyone believes that there is a limit to the capacity of the human racefor forming groups and subgroups on a moment's notice, for any reason orfor no reason at all, I would refer him to our assembly room and clubroomrecords; and he would find, I think, that these are typical of every largelibrary offering the use of such rooms somewhat freely. 

It will be noted that the library takes no part in organizing or operatingany of these activities; it does not have to do so. 

The successful leader is he who repairs to a hill and raises his standard, knowing that at sight of it followers will flock around him. When you dropa tiny crystal into a solution, the atoms all rush to it naturally: thereis no effort or compulsion except that of the aptitudes that their Creatorhas implanted in them. So it is with all centers, business or religious orsocial. No one instituted a campaign to locate the business center of acity at precisely such a square or corner. Things aggregate, and the pointto which they tend is their center; they make it, it does not make them. The leader on a hill is a leader because he has followers; without them hewould be but a lone warrior. The school or the library that says proudlyto itself, "Go to; I will be a social center, " may find itself in the samelonely position. It can offer an opportunity: that is all. It can offerhouseroom to clubs, organizations, and groups of all kinds, whetherpermanent or temporary, large or small, but its usefulness as a socialcenter depends largely on the existence of these and on their desire for ameeting place. We have in St. Louis six branch libraries with assemblyrooms and clubrooms--in all a dozen or so. I have before me the calendarfor a single week and I find 55 engagements, running from 24 at one branchdown thru 13, 8, 6, and 3 to one. If I had before me only the largestnumber I should conclude that branch libraries as social centers were ahowling success; if only the smallest, I should say that they were dismalfailures. Why the difference? For the same reason that the leader whodisplays his standard may or may not be surrounded with eager "flocking"followers. There may be no one within earshot, or they may have no stomachfor the war, or they may not be interested in the cause that herepresents. Or again, he may not shout loud or persuasively enough, or hisstandard may not be attractive enough in form or color, or mounted on asufficiently high staff. 

I have said that all we can offer is opportunity; to change our figure, wecan furnish the drinking-fountain--thirst must bring the horse to it. Butwe must not forget that we offer our opportunity in vain unless we aresure that everyone who might grasp it realizes our offer and what itmeans. 

Here is the chance for personal endeavor. If the young people in aneighborhood continue to hold their social meetings over a saloon when thebranch library or the school is perfectly willing to offer its assemblyroom, it is pretty certain that they do not understand that offer, or thatthey mistrust its sincerity, or that there is something wrong that mightbe remedied by personal effort. In the one of our branches that is mostused by organizations there is this personal touch. But I should hesitateto say that the others do not have it too. There are plenty oforganizations near this busiest library and there are no other good placesfor them to meet. In the neighborhood of some other branches there areother meeting-places, and elsewhere, perhaps, the social instinct is notso strong, or at any rate the effort to organize is lacking. Should thelibrarian step out and attempt to stimulate this social instinct and toguide this organizing effort? There is room for difference of opinionhere. 

Personally I think that he should not do it directly and officially as alibrarian. He may do it quietly and unobtrusively like any other privatecitizen, but he needs all his efforts, all his influence, to bring thebook and the reader together in his community. Sometimes by doing this hecan be doing the other too, and he can always do it vicariously. He shouldbear in mind that the successful man is not he who does everythinghimself, but he who can induce others to do things--to do them in his wayand to direct them toward his ends. Even in the most sluggish, the mostindifferent community there are these potential workers with enthusiasmsthat need only to be awakened to be let loose for good. The magic key isoften in the librarian's girdle, and his free offer of house room andsympathy, with good literature thrown in, will always be of powerfulassistance in this kind of effort. He will seldom need to do more than tomake clear the existence and the nature of the opportunity that he offers. I know that there are some librarians and many more teachers who hesitateto open their doors in any such way as this; who are afraid that theopportunities offered will be misused or that the activities so shelteredwill be misjudged by the public. It has shocked some persons that a youngpeople's dancing-class has been held, under irreproachable auspices, inone of our branch libraries; others have been grieved to see thatpolitical ward meetings have taken place in them, and that some ratherradical political theories have been debated there. These persons forgetthat a library never takes sides. It places on its shelves books on theCivil War from the standpoint of both North and South, histories of thegreat religious controversies by both Catholics and Protestants, ideas andtheories in science and philosophy from all sides and at all angles. Itmay give room at one time to a young people's dancing-class and at anotherto a meeting of persons who condemn dancing. Its walls may echo one day tothe praises of our tariff system and on another to fierce denunciations ofit. 

These things are all legitimate and it is better that they should takeplace in a library or a school building than in a saloon or even in agrocery store. The influence of environment is gently pervasive. I may bewrong, but I cannot help thinking that it is easier to be a gentleman in alibrary, whether in social meeting or in political debate, than it is insome other places. In one of our branches there meets a club of men whowould be termed anarchists by some people. The branch librarian assures methat the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly mildersince they have met in the library. It is getting to be literary, academic, philosophic. Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudiciousrepression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs and dynamite. 

In this catholicity I cannot help thinking that the library as aneducational institution is a step ahead of the school. Most teachers wouldresent the imputation of partisanship on the part of the school, and yetit is surely partisan--in some ways rightly and inevitably so. One cannotwell explain both sides of any question to a child of six and leave itsdecision to his judgment. This is obvious; and yet I cannot help thinkingthat there is one-sided teaching of children who are at least old enoughto know that there is another side, and that the one-sided teaching oftwo-sided subjects might be postponed in some cases until two-sidedinformation would be possible and proper. Where a child is taught one sideand finds out later that there is another, his resentment is apt to bebitter; it spoils the educational effect of much that he was taught andinjures the influence of the institution that taught him. My resentment isstill strong against the teaching that hid from me the southern viewpointconcerning slavery and secession, the Catholic viewpoint of what weProtestants call the Reformation--dozens of things omitted from textbookson dozens of subjects because they did not happen to meet the approval ofthe textbook compiler. I am no less an opponent of slavery--I am no less aProtestant--because I know the other side, but I think I am a better manfor knowing it, and I think it a thousand pities that there are thousandsof our fellow citizens, on all sides of all possible lines, from whom oureducative processes have hid even the fact that there is another side. This question, as I have said, does not affect the library, andfortunately need not affect it. And as we are necessarily two-sided in ourbook material so we can open our doors to free social or neighborhood usewithout bothering our heads about whether the users are Catholics, Protestants, or Jews; Democrats, Republicans, or Socialists; ChristianScientists or suffragists. The library hands our suffrage andanti-suffrage literature to its users with the same smile, and if it handsthe anti-suffrage books to the suffragist, and vice versa, both sides arecertainly the better for it. 

I have tried to make it clear in what I have said that in this matter ofsocial activity, public institutions should go as far as they can infurnishing facilities without taking upon themselves the burden ofadministration. I believe fully in municipal ownership of all kinds ofutilities, but rarely in municipal operation. Municipal ownershipsafeguards the city, and private or corporate operation avoids thenumerous objections to close municipal control of detail. So the libraryauthorities may retain sufficient control of these social activities bythe power that they have of admitting them to the parts of the buildingsprovided for them, or of excluding them at any time. These activitiesthemselves are better managed by voluntary bodies, and, as I have said, there is no indication that the formation of such bodies is on the wane. The establishment and operation of a musical or athletic club, a debatingsociety, or a Boy Scouts company, are surely quite as educational as theactivities themselves in which their members engage. Do not let usarrogate to ourselves such opportunities as these. I should be inclined totake this attitude also with regard to the public playgrounds, were theynot somewhat without the province of this paper; and I take it verystrongly with regard to the public school. Throw open the school buildingsas soon as you can, and as freely as you can to every legitimate form ofsocial activity, but let your relationship to this activity be like thatof the center to the circle--in it and of it, but embracing no part of itsareal content. So, I am convinced, will it be best for all of us--forourselves, the administrators of public property, and for the public, theowning body which is now demanding that it should not be barred out by itsservants from that property's freest and fullest use. 

THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF VIOLENCE

The peace propaganda has suffered much from the popular impression thatmany of those engaged in it are impractical enthusiasts who are assumingthe possibility of doing away with passions and prejudices incident to ourvery humanity, and of bringing about an ideal reign of love and good will. Whether this impression is or is not justified we need not now inquire. Itis the impression itself that is injuring the cause of peace, and willcontinue to injure it until it is removed. 

It may at least be lessened by allowing the mind to dwell for a time onanother aspect of the subject in which the regime of peace that wouldfollow the discontinuance of all settlement of disputes by violence willappear to consist not so much in the total disappearance of violence fromthe earth as in the use of it for a different purpose, namely, thepreservation of the peaceful status quo, by a systematic and lawful use offorce, or at any rate, the readiness to employ it. 

A state of peace, whether between individuals or nations, whether withoutor within a regime of law, always partakes of the nature of an armedtruce: under one regime, however, the arms are borne by the possiblecontestants themselves; under the other, by the community whose membersthey are. If there is a resort to arms, violence ensues under bothregimes; in both cases it tends ultimately to restore peace, but theaction is more certain and more systematic when the violence is exerted bythe community. 

These laws may apply indifferently to a community of individuals or to oneof nations. The most cogent and the most valid argument at the disposal ofthe peace advocate is the fact that we no longer allow the individual totake the law into his own hand, and that logically we should equallyprohibit the nation from doing so. This is unanswerable, but its force hasbeen greatly weakened by the assumption, which it requires no greatastuteness to find unwarranted, that the settlement of individual quarrelsby individual force has resulted from--or at least resulted in--thediscontinuance of violence altogether, or in the dawn of a general era ofgood-will, man to man. On the contrary, it is very doubtful whether thereis less violence to-day than there would be if the operation of law weresuspended altogether; the difference, is that the violence has shifted itsincidence and altered its aim--it is civic and social and no longerindividual. 

If we are to introduce the regime of law among nations as amongindividuals, our first step must be similarly to shift the incidence ofviolence. In so doing we may not decrease it, we may, indeed, increaseit--but we shall none the less be taking that step in the only possibledirection to achieve our purpose. 

Among individuals, custom, crystallizing into law, generally precedes theenforcement of that law by the community. Hence, a somewhat elaborate codemay exist side by side with the settlement of disputes, under that code, by personal combat. We have among nations such a code, and we yet admitthe settlement of disputes by war, because the incidence of violence hasnot yet completely shifted. We have established a tribunal to act, incertain cases, on behalf of the community of nations, but we have not yetgiven that tribunal complete jurisdiction and we have given it no powerwhatever to enforce its decrees. It is on this latter point that I desireto dwell. In a community of individuals, there are two ways of usingviolence to enforce law--by the professional police force and by the posseof citizens. The former is more effective, but the latter is often readierand more certain in particular instances, especially in primitivecommunities. To give it force we must have readiness on the part of everycitizen to respond to a call from the proper officer, and ability to doeffective service, especially by the possession of arms and skill in theiruse. These requisites are not generally found in more advancedcommunities. 

In like manner, the decrees of an international tribunal might be enforcedeither by the creation of an international army or by calling upon as manyof the nations as necessary to aid in coercing the non-law-abiding memberof the international community. Each nation is already armed and ready. 

Whatever may be thought of the ultimate possibility of an internationalarmy, it must be evident that the principle of the posse must serve us atthe outset. An international army would always consist in part of membersof the nation to be coerced, whereas, in selecting a posse those furthestin race and in sympathy from the offender might always be chosen, just asmembers of a hostile clan would make up the best posse to arrest aHighlander for sheep-stealing. 

Moreover, the posse has been used internationally more than once, as whendecrees have been pronounced by a general European Congress and someparticular nation or nations have been charged with their execution. 

When a frontier community that has been a law unto itself gets its firstsheriff, the earliest visible result is not impossibly a sudden increase, instead of a decrease, of violence. There is a war of the community, represented by the sheriff and the good citizens, against all the badones. Even so it may be expected that among the first results of aneffective agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal, would be an exceptionally great and violent war. Sooner or later somenation would be sure to take issue with an unpopular decree and refuse toobey it. This would probably be one of the larger and more powerfulnations, for a weaker power would not proceed to such lengths in protest. 

Not improbably other nations might join the protesting power. The resultwould be a war; it might even be the world war that we have been fearingfor a generation. It might conceivably be the greatest and the bloodiestwar that the world has yet seen. Yet it would be far the most glorious warof history, for it would be a struggle on behalf of law and order in thecommunity of nations--a fight to uphold that authority by whose exercisealone may peace be assured to the world. The man who shudders at theprospect of such a war, who wants peace, but is unwilling to fight for it, should cease his efforts on behalf of a universal agreement among nations, for there is no general agreement without power to quell dissension. 

This is not the place to discuss the details of an international agreementto enforce the decrees of an international tribunal. It may merely be saidthat if the most powerful and intelligent communities of men that haveever existed cannot devise machinery to do what puny individuals have longbeen successfully accomplishing, they had better disband and coalesce inuniversal anarchy. 

My object here is neither to propose plans nor to discuss details, butmerely to point out that not the abandonment, but the systematization ofviolence is the goal of a rational peace propaganda, and that when this isonce acknowledged and universally realized, an important step will havebeen taken toward winning over a class of persons who now oppose aworld-peace as impractical and impossible. 

These persons disapprove of disarmament: and from the point of view hereadvocated, a general disarmament would be the last thing to be desired. The possible member of a posse must bear arms to be effective. Armamentsmay have to be limited and controlled by international decree, but todisarm a nation would be as criminal and foolish as it would be to takeaway all weapons from the law-abiding citizens of a mining town as apreliminary to calling upon them to assist in the arrest of a notoriousband of outlaws. 

Again: a common objection to the peace propaganda is that without war weshall have none of the heroic virtues that war calls into being. Thisobjection fails utterly when we consider that what we shall get under aproper international agreement is not the abolition of war, but simply anassurance that when there is a war it will be one in which every goodcitizen can take at once the part of international law and order--acontest between the law and the law-breaker, and not one in which bothcontestants are equally lawless. Thus the profession of arms will still bean honorable one--it will, in fact, be much more honorable than it isto-day, when it may at any moment be prostituted to the service of greedor commercialism. 

THE ART OF RE-READING

"I have nothing to read, " said a man to me once. "But your house seems tobe filled with books. " "O, yes; but I've read them already. " What shouldwe think of a man who should complain that he had no friends, when hishouse was thronged daily with guests, simply because he had seen andtalked with them all once before? Such a man has either chosen badly, orhe is himself at fault. "Hold fast that which is good" says the Scripture. Do not taste it once and throw it away. To get at the root of this matterwe must go farther back than literature and inquire what it has in commonwith all other forms of art to compel our love and admiration. Now, a workof art differs from any other result of human endeavor in this--that itseffect depends chiefly on the way in which it is made and only secondarilyupon what it is or what it represents. Were this not true, all statues ofApollo or Venus would have the same art-value; and you or I, if we couldfind a tree and a hill that Corot had painted, would be able to produce apicture as charming to the beholder as his. 

The way in which a thing is done is, of course, always important, but itsimportance outside of the sphere of art differs from that within. The wayin which a machine is constructed makes it good or bad, but the thing thatis aimed at here is the useful working of the machine, toward which allthe skill of the maker is directed. What the artist aims at is not so muchto produce a likeness of a god or a picture of a tree, as to producecertain effects in the person who looks at his complete work; and this hedoes by the way in which he performs it. The fact that a paintingrepresents certain trees and hills is here only secondary; the primaryfact is what the artist has succeeded in making the on-looker feel. 

While Sorolla is painting a group of children on the beach, I may take akodak picture of the same group. My photograph may be a better likenessthan Sorolla's picture, but it has no art-value. Why? Because it was mademechanically, whereas Sorolla put into his picture something of himself, making it a unique thing, incapable of imitation or of reproduction. 

The man who has a message, one of those pervasive, compelling messagesthat are worth while, naturally turns to art. He chooses his subject notas an end, but as a vehicle, and he makes it speak his message by hismethod of treatment, conveying it to his public more or less successfullyin the measure of his skill. 

We have been speaking of the representative arts of painting andsculpture, but the same is true of art in any form. In music, not arepresentative art, in spite of the somewhat grotesque claims of so-calledprogram music, the method of the composer is everything, or at least hissubject is so vague and immaterial that no one would think of exalting itas an end in itself. There is, however, an art in which the subject standsforth so prominently that even those who love the art itself arecontinually in danger of forgetting the subject's secondary character. Imean the art of literature. Among the works of written speech theboundaries of art are much more ill-defined than they are elsewhere. Thereis, to be sure, as much difference between Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"and Todhunter's "Trigonometry" as there is between the Venus de Milo and abattleship; and I conceive that the difference is also of precisely thesame kind, being that by which, as we have seen above, we may alwaysdiscriminate between a work of art and one of utility. But where art-valueand utility are closely combined, as they are most frequently inliterature, it is, I believe, more difficult to divide them mentally andto dwell on their separate characteristics, than where the work is aconcrete object. This is why we hear so many disputes about whether agiven work does or does not belong to the realm of "pure literature, " andit is also the reason why, as I have said, some, even among those who loveliterature, are not always ready to recognize its nature as an art, ormistakenly believe that in so far as its art-value is concerned, thesubject portrayed is of primary importance--is an aim in itself instead ofbeing a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an impression. 

Take, if you please, works which were intended by their authors as worksof utility, but have survived as works of art in spite of themselves, suchas Walton's "Compleat Angler" and White's "Natural History of Selborne. "Will anyone maintain that the subject-matter of those books has much to dowith their preservation, or with the estimation in which they are nowheld? Nay; we may even be so bold as to enter the field of fiction and toassert that those fictional works that have purely literary value areloved not for the story they tell, but for the way in which the authortells it and for the effect that he thereby produces on the reader. 

I conceive that pure literature is an art, subject to the rules thatgovern all art, and that its value depends primarily on the effectproduced on the reader--the message conveyed--by the way in which thewriter has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Wherea man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily, he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, adrama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it ishis message that matters. 

My excuse for dwelling on this matter must be that unless I have carriedyou with me thus far what I am about to say will have no meaning, and Ihad best fold my papers, make my bow, and conclude an unprofitablebusiness. For my subject is re-reading, the repetition of a message; andthe message that we would willingly hear repeated is not that of utilitybut of emotion. It is the word that thrills the heart, nerves the arm, andputs new life into the veins, not that which simply conveys information. The former will produce its effect again and again, custom can not staleit. The latter, once delivered, has done its work. I see two messengersapproaching; one, whom I have sent to a library to ascertain thebirth-date of Oliver Cromwell, tells me what it is and receives my thanks. The other tells me that one dear to my heart, long lying at death's door, is recovering. My blood courses through my veins; my nerves tingle; joysuffuses me where gloom reigned before. I cry out; I beg the bearer ofgood tidings to tell them again and again; I keep him by me, so that I mayask him a thousand questions, bringing out his message in a thousandvariant forms. But do I turn to the other and say, "O, that blessed date!was Cromwell truly born thereon? Let me, I pray, hear you recite it againand again!" I trow, not. 

The message that we desire to hear again is the one that produces itseffect again and again; and that is the message of feeling, the message ofart--not that of mere utility. This is so true that I conceive we may useit as a test of art-value. The great works of literature do not lose theireffect on a single reading. One makes response to them the hundredth timeas he did the first. Their appeal is so compelling that there is nodenying it--no resisting it. There are snatches of poetry--and of prose, too--that we have by heart; that we murmur to ourselves again and again, sure that the response which never failed will come again, thrilling thewhole organism with its pathos, uplifting us with the nobility of itsappeal, warming us with its humor. There is a little sequence of homelyverse that never fails to bring the tears to my eyes. I have tested myselfwith it under the most unfavorable circumstances. In the midst ofbusiness, amid social jollity, in the mental dullness of fatigue, I havestopped and repeated to myself those three verses. So quickly acts themagic of the author's skill that the earlier verses grip the fibers of mymind and twist them in such fashion that I feel the pathos of the lastlines just as I felt them for the first time, years ago. You might alltell similar stories. I believe that this is a characteristic of goodliterature, and that all of it will bear reading, and re-reading, andreading again. 

But I hear someone say, "Do you mean to tell me that those three littleverses that bring the tears to your eyes, will bring them also to mine andmy neighbor's? I might listen to them appreciatively but dry-eyed; myneighbor might not care for them enough to re-read them once. All about uswe see this personal equation in the appreciation of literature. Unlessyou are prepared, then, to maintain that literature may be good for oneand bad for another, your contention will scarcely hold water. "

Even so, brother. The messenger who told me of the safety of my dear onedid not thrill your heart as he did mine. She was dear to me, not to you, and the infinitely delicate yet powerful chain of conditions and relationsthat operated between the messenger's voice and my emotional nature didnot connect him with yours. Assuredly, the message that reaches one manmay not reach another. It may even reach a man in his youth and fall shortin manhood, or vice versa. It may be good for him and inoperative on allthe rest of the world. We estimate literature, it is true, by theuniversality of its appeal or by the character of the persons whom alonethat appeal reaches. The message of literature as art may thus be to thecrowd or to a select few. I could even imagine intellect and feeling ofsuch exquisite fineness, such acknowledged superiority, that appeal to italone might be enough to fix the status of a work of art, though it mightleave all others cold. Still, in general I believe, that the greatestliterature appeals to the greatest number and to the largest number oftypes. I believe that there are very few persons to whom Shakespeare, properly presented, will not appeal. In him, nevertheless, the learned andthose of taste also delight. There are authors like Walter Pater who are ajoy to the few but do not please the many. There are others galore, whomperhaps it would be invidious to name, who inspire joy in the multitudebut only distaste in the more discriminating. We place Pater above these, just as we should always put quality above quantity; but I placeShakespeare vastly higher, because his appeal is to the few and the manyat once. 

But we must, I think, acknowledge that an author whose value may notappeal to others may be great to one reader; that his influence on thatreader may be as strong for good as if it were universal instead ofunique. We may not place such a writer in the Walhalla, but I beseech you, do not let us tear him rudely from the one or two to whom he is good andgreat. Do not lop off the clinging arms at the elbow, but rather skilfullypresent some other object of adoration to the intent that they mayvoluntarily untwine and enfold this new object more worthily. 

The man who desires to own books but who can afford only a small andselect library can not do better than to make his selection on thisbasis--to get together a collection of well-loved books any one of whichwould give him pleasure in re-reading. Why should a man harbor in hishouse a book that he has read once and never cares to read again? Whyshould he own one that he will never care to read at all? We are notconsidering the books of the great collectors, coveted for their rarity ortheir early dates, for their previous ownership or the beauty of theirbinding--for any reason except the one that makes them books rather thancuriosities. These collections are not libraries in the intellectual orthe literary sense. Three well thumbed volumes in the attic of one wholoves them are a better library for him than those on which PierpontMorgan spent his millions. 

This advice, it will be noted, implies that the man has an opportunity toread the book before he decides whether to buy it or not. Here is wherethe Public Library comes in. Some regard the Public Library as aninstitution to obviate all necessity of owning books. It should rather beregarded from our present standpoint as an institution to enable readersto own the books that they need--to survey the field and make therefrom aproper and well-considered selection. That it has acted so in the past, none may doubt; it is the business of librarians to see that this functionis emphasized in the future. The bookseller and the librarian are notrivals, but co-workers. Librarians complain of the point of view of thosepublishers and dealers who regard every library user as a lost customer. He is rather, they say, in many cases a customer won--a non-reader addedto the reading class--a possible purchaser of books. But have notlibrarians shared somewhat this mistaken and intolerant attitude? Howoften do we urge our readers to become book-owners? How often do we givethem information and aid directed toward this end? The success of theChristmas book exhibitions held in many libraries should be a lesson tous. The lists issued in connection with these almost always includeprices, publishers' names, and other information intended especially forthe would-be purchaser. But why should we limit our efforts to the holidayseason? True, every librarian does occasionally respond to requests foradvice in book-selection and book-purchase, but the library is not yetrecognized as the great testing field of the would-be book owner; thelibrarian is not yet hailed as the community's expert adviser in theselection and purchase of books, as well as its book guardian and bookdistributor. That this may be and should be, I believe. It will be if thelibrarian wills it. 

Are we straying from our subject? No; for from our present standpoint abook bought is a book reread. My ideal private library is a room, be itlarge or small, lined with books, every one of which is the owner'sfamiliar friend, some almost known by heart, others re-read many times, others still waiting to be re-read. 

But how about the man whose first selection for this intimate personalgroup would be a complete set of the works of George Ade? Well, if that ishis taste, let his library reflect it. Let a man be himself. That there isvirtue in merely surrounding oneself with the great masters of literatureall unread and unloved, I can not see. Better acknowledge your poor tastethan be a hypocrite. 

The librarian can not force the classics down the unwilling throats ofthose who do not care for them and are perhaps unfitted to appreciatethem. There has been entirely too much of this already and it has resulteddisastrously. Surely, a sane via media is possible, and we may agree thata man will never like Eschylus, without assuring him that Eschylus is anout-of-date old fogy, while on the other hand we may acknowledge thegreatness of Homer and Milton without trying to force them upon unwillingand incompetent readers. After all it is not so much a question of Miltonversus George Ade, as it is of sanity and wholesomeness against vulgarityand morbidity. And if I were to walk through one city and beholdcollections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of good taste, of love forhumor that is wholesome, sentiment that is sane, verse that is tuneful andnoble, I should at once call on the public librarian and I should say tohim, "Thou art the man!" The literary taste of your community is areflection of your own as shown forth in your own institution--itscollection of books, the assistants with which you have surroundedyourself, your attitude and theirs through you toward literature andtoward the public. 

But, someone asks, suppose that I am so fortunate and so happy as to sitin the midst of such a group of friendly authors; how and how often shallI re-read? Shall I traverse the group every year? He who speaks thus isplaying a part; he is not the real thing. Does the young lover ask how andhow often he shall go to see his sweetheart? Try to see whether you cankeep him away! The book-lover reopens his favorite volume whenever hefeels like it. Among the works on his shelves are books for every mood, every shade of varying temper and humor. He chooses for the moment thefriend that best corresponds to it, or it may be, the one that may bestwoo him away from it. It may be that he will select none of them, butoccupy himself with a pile of newcomers, some of whom may be candidatesfor admission to the inner group. The whole thing--the composition of hislibrary, his attitude toward it, the books that he re-reads oftenest, thefavorite passages that he loves, that he scans fondly with his eye whileyet he can repeat them by heart, his standards of admission to his innercircle--all is peculiarly and personally his own. There is no otherprecisely like it, just as there is no other human being precisely likeits owner. There is as much difference between this kind of a library andsome that we have seen as there is between a live, breathing creature witha mind and emotions and aspirations, and a wax figure in the Eden Musee. 

Thus every book lover re-reads his favorites in a way of his own, just asevery individual human being loves or hates or mourns or rejoices in a wayof his own. 

One can no more describe these idiosyncrasies than he can write a historyof all the individuals in the world, but perhaps, in the manner of theethnological or zoological classifier, it may interest us to glance at thetypes of a few genera or species. 

And first, please note that re-reading is the exact repetition of a dualmental experience, so far at least as one of the minds is concerned. It isa replica of mind-contact, under conditions obtainable nowhere else inthis world and of such nature that some of them seem almost to partake ofother-worldliness. My yesterday's interview with Smith or Jones, trivialas it is, I can not repeat. Smith can not remember what he said, and evenif he could, he could not say it to me in the same way and to the samepurpose. But my interview with Plato--with Shakespeare, with Emerson; mytalk with Julius Caesar, with Goethe, with Lincoln! I can duplicate itonce, twice, a hundred times. My own mind--one party to the contact--maychange, but Plato's or Lincoln's is ever the same; they speak no "variouslanguage" like Byrant's nature, but are like that great Author of Naturewho has taken them to Himself, in that in them "is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. " To realize that these men may speak to metoday, across the abyss of time, and that I can count on the same messagetomorrow, next year and on my death bed, in the same authentic words, producing the same effect, assures me that somewhere, somehow, a miraclehas been wrought. 

I have said that one of the minds that come thus into contact changes not, while the other, the reader's, is alterable. This gives him a sort ofstandard by which he can measure or at least estimate, the changes that goon within him, the temporary ones due to fluctuations in health, strengthor temper, the progressive ones due to natural growth or to outsideinfluences. 

In his "Introduction to Don Quixote, " Heine tells us how that book, thefirst that he ever read, was his mental companion through life. In thatfirst perusal knowing not "how much irony God had interwoven into theworld, " he looked upon the luckless knight as a real hero of romance andwept bitterly when his chivalry and generosity met with ingratitude andviolence. A little later, when the satire dawned upon his comprehension, he could not bear the book. Still later he read it with contemptuouslaughter at the poor knight. But when in later life, he lay racked on abed of pain his attitude of sympathy returned. "Dulcinea del Toboso, " hesays "is still the most beautiful woman in the world; although I liestretched upon the earth, helpless and miserable, I will never take backthat assertion. I can not do otherwise. On with your lances, ye Knights ofthe Silver Moon; ye disguised barbers!"

So every reader's viewpoint shifts with the years. 

Our friend who welcomes George Ade to his inner sanctuary may find as theyears go on that his reaction to that contact has altered. I should notrecommend that the author be then be cast into outer darkness. Once afavorite, always a favorite, for old sake's sake even if not for presentpower and influence. Our private libraries will hold shelf after shelf ofthese old-time favorites--milestones on the intellectual track over whichwe have wearily or joyously traveled. 

There will always be a warm spot in my heart and a nook on my privateshelf for Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger. Though I bar them from mylibrary (I mean my Library with a big L) I have no right to exclude themfrom my private collection of favorites, for once I loved them. I scarcelyknow why or how. If there had been in those far-off days of my boyhood, children's libraries and children's librarians, I might not have knownthem; as it is, they are incidents in my literary past that can not beblinked, shameful though they may be. The re-reading of such books asthese is interesting because it shows us how far we have traveled since wecounted them among our favorites. 

Then there is the book that, despite its acknowledged excellence, thereader would not perhaps admit to his inner circle if he read it now forthe first time. It holds its place largely on account of the glamour withwhich his youth invested it. It thrills him now as it thrilled him then, but he half suspects that the thrill is largely reminiscent. I sometimesfancy that as I re-read Ivanhoe and my heart leaps to my mouth when theknights clash at Ashby, the propulsive power of that leap had its originin the emotions of 1870 rather than those of 1914. And when some ofDickens' pathos--that death-bed of Paul Dombey for instance--brings thetears again unbidden to my eyes, I suspect, though I scarcely dare to putmy suspicion into words, that the salt in those tears is of the vintage of1875. I am reading Arnold Bennett now and loving him very dearly when heis at his best; but how I shall feel about him in 1930 or how I might feelif I could live until 2014, is another question. 

Then there is the book that, scarce comprehended or appreciated when itwas first read, but loved for some magic of expression or turn of thought, shows new beauties at each re-reading, unfolding like an opening rose andbringing to view petals of beauty, wit, wisdom and power that were beforeunsuspected. This is the kind of book that one loves most to re-read, forthe growth that one sees in it is after all in oneself--not in the book. The gems that you did not see when you read it first were there then asthey are now. You saw them not then and you see them now, for your mentalsight is stronger--you are more of a man now than you were then. 

Not that all the changes of the years are necessarily for the better. Theymay be neither for better nor for worse. As the moving train hurries usonward we may enjoy successively the beauties of canyon, prairie and lake, admiring each as we come to it without prejudice to what has gone before. In youth we love only bright colors and their contrasts--brilliant sunsetsand autumn foliage; in later life we come to appreciate also the moredelicate tints and their gradations--a prospect of swamp-land and distantlake or sea on a gray day; a smoky town in the fog; the tender dove colorsof early dawns. So in youth we eagerly read of blood and glory and wildadventure; Trollope is insufferably dull. Jane Austen is for old maids;even such a gem as Cranford we do not rate at its true value. But in afterlife how their quiet shades and tints come out! There is no glory in them, no carnage, no combat; but there is charm and fascination in the veryslowness of their movement, the shortness of their range, their lack ofintensity, the absence of the shrill, high notes and the tremendous bases. 

Then there is the re-reading that accuses the reader of another kind ofchange--a twist to the right or the left, a cast in the mental eye, orperhaps the correction of such a cast. The doctrines in some book seemedstrange to you once--almost abhorrent; you are ready to accept them now. Is it because you then saw through a glass darkly and now more clearly? Oris your vision darker now than it was? Your rereading apprizes you thatthere has been a change of some sort. Perhaps you must await corroborativetestimony before you decide what its nature has been. Possibly you readtoday without a blush what your mind of twenty years ago would have beenshocked to meet. Are you broader-minded or just hardened? These questionsare disquieting, but the disturbance that they cause is wholesome, and Iknow of no way in which they can be raised in more uncompromising formthan by re-reading an old favorite, by bringing the alterable fabric ofyour living, growing and changing mind into contact with the stiff, unyielding yardstick of an unchangeable mental record--the cast of onephase of a master mind that once was but has passed on. 

Here I can not help saying a word of a kind of re-reading that is not theperusal of literature at all with most of us--the re-reading of our ownwords, written down in previous years--old letters, old lectures, articles--books, perhaps, if we chance to be authors. Of little value, perhaps, to others, these are of the greatest interest to ourselvesbecause instead of measuring our minds by an outside standard they enableus to set side by side two phases of our own life--the ego of 1892, perhaps, and that of 1914. How boyish that other ego was; how it jumped toconclusions; how ignorant it was and how self-confident! And yet, howfresh it was; how quickly responsive to new impressions; how unspoiled;how aspiring! If you want to know the changes that have transformed themind that was into the very different one that now is, read your own oldletters. 

I have tried to show you that pure literature is an art and like otherarts depends primarily upon manner and only secondarily upon matter. Thatthe artist, who in this case is the author, uses his power to influencethe reader usually through his emotions or feelings and that its effectsto a notable extent, are not marred by repetition. That on this accountall good literature may be re-read over and over, and that the pleasurederived from such re-reading is a sign that a book is peculiarly adaptedin some way to the reader. Finally, that one's private library, especiallyif its size be limited, may well consist of personal favorites, oftenre-read. 

When the astronomer Kepler had reduced to simple laws the complicatedmotions of the planets he cried out in ecstacy: "O God! now think I Thythoughts after Thee!" Thus when a great writer of old time has beenvouchsafed a spark of the divine fire we may think his divine thoughtsafter him by re-reading. And Shakespeare tells us in that deathless speechof Portia's, that since mercy is God's attribute we may by exercising itbecome like God. Thus, by the mere act of tuning our brains to think thethoughts that the Almighty has put into the minds of the good and thegreat, may it not be that our own thoughts may at the last come to beshaped in the same mould?

"Old wine, old friends, old books, " says the old adage; and of the threethe last are surely the most satisfying. The old wine may turn to vinegar;old friends may forget or forsake us; but the old book is ever the same. What would the old man do without it? And to you who are young I wouldsay--you may re-read, you first must read. Choose worthy books to love. Asfor those who know no book long enough either to love or despise it--whoskim through good and bad alike and forget page ninety-nine while readingpage 100, we may simply say to them, in the words of the witty Frenchman, "What a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!"

HISTORY AND HEREDITY[8]

 [8] Read before the New England Society of St. Louis. 

In one of his earlier books, Prof. Hugo Munsterberg cites the growing lovefor tracing pedigrees as evidence of a dangerous American tendency towardaristocracy. There are only two little things the matter with this--thefact and the inference from it. In the first place, we Americans havealways been proud of our ancestry and fond of tracing it; and in thesecond place, this fondness is akin, not to aristocracy but to democracy. It is not the purpose of this paper to prove this thesis in detail, so Iwill merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confinethemselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one ofthe great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the FirstBaron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and hisgreat-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far moreapt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, becausethey are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to provea point, American genealogical research is biological, while that ofEurope is commercial. 

An obvious advantage of interest in our ancestors is that it ought to makehistory a more vital thing to us; for to them, history was merely currentevents in which they took part, or which, at least, they watched. Thislinking up of our personal ancestral lines with past events is done tooseldom. Societies like the New England Society are doing it, and it is forthis reason that I have chosen to bring the subject briefly before you. 

It has been noted that our historical notions of the Civil War are now, and are going to be in the future, more just and less partisan than thoseof the Revolution. This is not because we are nearer the Civil War; fornearness often tends to confuse historical ideas rather than to clear themup. It is because the descendants of those who fought on both sides arehere with us, citizens of our common country, intermarrying and cominginto contact in a thousand ways. We are not likely to ignore the Southernstandpoint regarding the rights of secession and the events of thestruggle so long as the sons and daughters of Confederate soldiers liveamong us. Nor shall we ever forget the Northern point of view while thedescendants of those who fought with Grant and Sherman are our friends andneighbors. 

It is otherwise with the Revolution. We are the descendants only of thosewho fought on one side. Of the others, part went back to their homes inEngland, the rest, our old neighbors and friends, we despoiled of theirlands and drove across our northern border with execrations, to make newhomes in a new land and view us with a hatred that has not yet passedaway. If you doubt it, discuss the American Revolution for fifteen minuteswith one of the United Empire Loyalists of Toronto. It will surprise youto know that your patriot ancestors were thieves, blacklegs andscoundrels. I do not believe that they were; but possibly they were notthe impossible archangels of the school histories. 

Of one thing I am sure; that if the descendants of those who foughtagainst us in '76 had been left to mingle with our own people, thehistorical recollections of the struggle would have been surer and trueron both sides than they are today. Here is a case where ancestry hasperverted history, but simply because there has been an unnaturalsegregation of descendants. Let me note another where we have absolutelyforgotten our ancestral predilections and have gone over to the otherside, simply because the other side made the records. When we read a Romanaccount of encounters between the legions and the northern tribes, wheredo we place ourselves in imagination, as readers? Always with the Romanlegions. But our place is not there; it is with our hardy and braveforefathers, fighting to defend their country and their firesides againstthe southern intruders. How many teachers of history try to utilizerace-consciousness in their pupils to make them attain a clearer knowledgeof what it all meant? Should we not be proud that we are of the blood ofmen who withstood the self-styled rulers of the world and won theirfreedom and their right to shape their own personal and civic development?

I should like to see a book tracing the history and development of animaginary Anglo-Saxon American line of ancestry, taking it from theforests of Northern Germany across to Britain, through the Norman conquestand down the stream of subsequent English history across seas toAmerica--through savage wars and Revolution, perhaps across theAlleghenies, to settle finally in the great West. I would try to make thereader realize that here was no fairy tale--no tale of countries and raceswith which we have naught to do, but the story of our own fathers, whosefeatures and whose characteristics, physical and mental, have beentransmitted by heredity to us, their sons and daughters of the year 1913. 

It is unfortunate perhaps, for our perceptions of racial continuity, thatwe are rovers by disposition. Who runs across the sea, says the Latinpoet, changes his sky but not his mind. True enough, but it is difficultfor some of us to realize it. It is hard for some of us to realize thatour emigrant ancestors were the same men and women when they set foot onthese shores as when they left the other side some weeks before. Ourtrans-Atlantic cousins labor under the same difficulties, for they assureus continually that we are a "new" country. We have, they say, the faultsand the advantages of "youth. " It would be interesting to know at justwhat point in the passage the education and the habits and the prejudicesof the incoming Englishman dropped off. Change of environment workswonders with habits and even with character; we must of course recognizethat; but it certainly does not make of the mind a _tabula rasa_, on whichthe fresh surroundings may absolutely work their will. 

I must say that our migrations within the limits of our own continent havenot been productive of so much forgetfulness. I have been struck, forinstance, since I came to St. Louis, with what I may call thesource-consciousness of our western population. Everyone, whether he isparticularly interested in genealogy or not, knows that his people camefrom Vermont or Virginia or Pennsylvania. He may not be able to trace hisancestry, or even to name his great-grandfather; but with the source ofthat ancestry he is always acquainted. I believe this to be the casethroughout the Middle West. From this point of view the population is notso well mixed as it is in the East. No one in Massachusetts or Connecticutcan point out to you, offhand, the families that came from particularcounties in England. And yet in England, a migration from one county toanother is always recognized and remembered. A cousin of mine, visiting onan English estate, was casually informed by his host, "Our family arenewcomers in this county. We moved in only about 300 years ago. " From thispoint of view we are all newcomers in America. It is to be hoped that asthe years go on, the elements of our western population will not sothoroughly lose sight of their sources as have the Easterners. It is notlikely that they will, for those sources are more accessible. We haveVirginia families who still keep up friendly intercourse with the oldstock; Vermont families who spend each summer on the old homestead; and soon. The New Englander did not and could not keep up similar relations withOld England. Even the Southerner, who did it for a time, had to drop it. Our inter-communication with Europe has grown enormously in volume, butlittle of it, if any, is due to continuous ancestral interest, although arevived general interest has sprung up and is to be commended. 

I fear, however, that the greater part of this interest in sources, whereit exists, is very far from an intelligent connection with the body ofhistorical fact. When a man is proud of the fact that an ancestor tookpart in the famous Boston Tea Party, has he taken any pains to ascertainwhat actually took place on that occasion? If he claims descent fromPocahontas, can he tell us just how much of what we currently believe ofher is fact and how much is myth? If he knows that his family came fromCheshire, England, and was established and well-known there for centuries, what does he know of the history of Cheshire and of the connection of hisancestors with it? Our interest, when it exists, is concentrated too muchon trivial happenings. We know and boast that an ancestor came over in theMayflower without knowing of the family doings before and after thatevent. Of course, connection with some one picturesque event serves tostimulate the imagination and focus the interest, but these events shouldserve as starting points for investigation rather than resting pointswhere interest begins and ends. Historical students are beginning torealize that it is not enough to know about the battle of Hastings withoutunderstanding the causes and forces that led to it and proceeded from it, and the daily lives and thoughts of those who took part in it, fromcaptain to spearman. 

This failure to link up family history with general history is responsiblefor many sad losses of historical material. Many persons do not understandthe value of old letters and diaries; many who do, keep them closely inthe family archives where they are unknown and unappreciated. Old letterscontaining material that bears in any way on the events, customs or lifeof the time, should be turned over to the local historical society. Ifthey contain private matter, seal up the packet and require that it shallremain sealed for a century, if you wish; but do not burn it. The feelingthat destroys such documents is simply evidence that we are historicallyvaluing the individual and the family above the community, just as westill are in so many other fields of thought. I cannot tolerate the ideathat we shall ultimately think only in terms of the common good; thesmaller units, the man, the family must not lose their influence, but theconnection between them and the general welfare must be better understoodand more generally recognized; and this must be done, in the first place, in all that relates to their historical records and to our historicalconsciousness. 

Ancestral feeling should, in this way, always be historical, notindividual. A man is right to be personally proud of his own achievements, but it is difficult to see how he can properly take the same kind of pridein that of others, whether related to him by blood or not. But there areother kinds of legitimate pride--family pride, racial pride, group prideof all sorts, where the feeling is not personal. If any member of afamily, a profession or any association, has so conducted himself thatcredit is gained for the whole body, it is proper that this kind of grouppride should be felt by each member of the body, and in the case of afamily, where the bond is one of blood, the group feeling should bestronger and the group pride, if it is proper to feel it at all, may be ofpeculiar strength, provided it be carefully distinguished from the pridedue to personal achievement. And when the member of the family in whom onetakes pride is an ancestor, this means, as I have said, that feelingshould be historical, not individual. And anything that tends to lift ourinterest from the individual to the historical plane--to make us ceasefrom congratulating ourselves personally on some connection with the goodand great and substitute a feeling of group pride shared in common by somebody to which we all belong, is acting toward this desirable end. The bodymay be a family; it may be the community or the state; it may be as broadas humanity itself, for we may all be proud of the world's greatest. Or itmay be a body like our own, formed to cherish the memories of forebears insome particular line of endeavor, in some particular place or at someparticular era. Our ancestry is part of our history; so long as our regardfor it is properly interwoven with our historical sense, no one canproperly charge us with laving the foundation for aristocracy. We arerather making true democracy possible, for such is the case only when theelements of a community are closely united by ties of blood, interest andknowledge--by pride in those who have gone before and by determinationthat the standard set by these men and women of old shall be worthilyupheld. 

WHAT THE FLAG STANDS FOR[9]

 [9] An address on Flag Day made in St. Peter's Church, St. Louis. 

The most important things in the world are ideas. We are so familiar withthe things that are the material embodiment of ideas--buildings, roads, vehicles and machines--that we are prone to forget that without the ideasthat gave them birth all these would be impossible. A house is a mass ofwood, stone and metal, but all these substances, collected in a pile, donot suffice to make a house. 

A locomotive is made of steel and brass, but although the ancient Romanshad both the metal and the alloy, they had no locomotives. 

The vital thing about the house--the thing that differentiates it fromother masses of the same materials--is the idea--the plan--that was in thearchitect's mind while wood and stone and iron were still in forest, quarry and mine. The vital thing about the locomotive is the builder'sidea or plan, which he derived, in turn, from the inventor. 

The reason why there were no locomotives in ancient Rome is that in thosedays the locomotive had not yet been invented, and when we say this werefer not to the materials, which the Romans had in abundance, but to theidea or plan of the locomotive. So it is with the whole material worldabout us. The things that result, not from man's activities, but from theoperations of nature, are no exceptions; for, if we are Christians, webelieve that the idea or plan of a man, or a horse, or a tree, was in themind of the great architect, the great machinist, before the world began, and that this idea is the important thing about each. 

A man, a house, an engine--these are ideas that lead to things that we canfeel, and see and hear. But there are other ideas that have nothing of thekind to correspond to them--I mean such ideas as charity, manliness, religion and patriotism--what sometimes are called abstract qualities. These are real things and their ideas are even more important than theothers, but we cannot see nor feel them. 

Now, man likes to use his senses, and it is for this reason that he isfond of using for these abstract ideas, symbols that he can see and feel. We of St. Louis should appreciate this to the full just now, for we havejust set before the world the greatest assemblage of symbolic images andacts, portraying our pride in the past and our hope and confidence for thefuture, that any city on this earth ever has been privileged to present orto witness. [10] Whether we were actors or spectators; whether we campedwith the Indians, marched with De Soto or La Salle and felled the forestsof early St. Louis with Laclede and Chouteau, or whether we were part ofthat great host on the hillside, we can say no longer that we do notunderstand the importance of the idea, or the value and cogency of thevisible symbols that fix it in the memory and grip it to the heart. 

 [10] The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, 1915. 

The Church of Christ always has understood and used this property of thevisible and tangible symbol to enforce the claims of the abstract idea. 

We revere the cross, not because there is anything in its shape orsubstance to make us venerate it, but because it is the symbol of theChristian religion--of all that it has done for the world in the past andall that it may do in the future. That is why we love and honor theflag--not because it is a piece of cloth bearing certain figures andcolors, but because it is to us the symbol of all that our country hasmeant to our fathers; all it means to us and all that it may mean to ourchildren, generation after generation. 

A nation's flag did not always mean all this to those who gazed upon it. In very old times the flag was for the soldier alone and had no moremeaning for the ordinary citizen than a helmet or a spear. When thesoldier saw it uplifted in the thick of the battle he rallied to it. Thenthe flag became the personal emblem of a king or a prince, whether inbattle or not; then it was used to mark what belonged to the government ofa country. It is still so used in many parts of Europe, where the displayof a flag on a building marks it as government property, as our flag doeswhen it is used on a post office or a custom-house. Nowhere but in our owncountry is the flag used as the general symbol of patriotic feeling anddisplayed alike by soldier and citizen, by Government office and privatedwelling. So it comes about that the stars and stripes means to us allthat his eagles did to the Roman soldier; all that the great Oriflamme didto the medieval Frenchman; all that the Union Jack now means to the Britonor the tri-color to the Frenchman--and more, very much more, beside. 

What ideas, then, does the flag stand for? First, it stands for union. Itwas conceived in union, it was dipped in blood to preserve union, and forunion it still stands. Its thirteen stripes remind us of that gallantlittle strip of united colonies along the Atlantic shore that threw downthe gage of battle to Britain a century and a half ago. Its stars aresymbols of the wider union that now is. Both may be held to signify thegreat truth that in singleness of purpose among many there is effectivestrength that no one by himself can hope to achieve. Our union of Stateswas formed in fear of foreign aggression; we have need of it still thoughour foes be of our own household. If we are ever to govern our citiesproperly, hold the balance evenly betwixt capital and labor, develop ourgreat natural resources without undue generosity on the one hand orparsimony on the other--solve the thousand and one problems that rise toconfront us on every hand--we shall never accomplish these things bystruggling singly--one man at a time or even one State at a time, but byconcerted, 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 mustdecide for himself, with the aid of such intelligence and judgment as ithas pleased God to give him. But if he should decide in its favor, becertain that his individual vote at the polls will go a very little waytoward bringing his desires to pass. We are governed by majorities, and amajority is a union of many. He who would win must not only vote, butwork. Our flag, with its assemblages of stripes and stars, is a perpetualreminder that by the union of the many, and not merely by the rectitude ofthe individual, are policies altered and charters changed. 

Again, our flag stands for love. It is a beautiful flag and it stands fora beautiful land. We all love what is our own, if we are normal men andwomen--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" hasmy hearty sympathy. Not that the Rockies or the Sierras are necessarilymore beautiful than the Alps or the Missouri fairer than the Danube; weshould have no more to do here with comparisons than the man who loves hischildren. He does not, before deciding that he will love them, comparethem critically with his neighbors'. If we do not love the Grand Canyonand the Northern Rockies, the wild Sierras and the more peaceful beautiesof the Alleghenies or the Adirondacks, simply because leaving these allunseen we prefer the lakes and mountains of foreign lands, we are like aman who should desert his own children, whom he had never seen, to passhis time at a moving-picture show, because he believed that he saw therefaces and forms more fair than those of his own little ones. When we singin 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 wegaze at the old flag that symbolizes that love. Does this mean that whenour country makes an error we are to shut our eyes to it? Does it requireus to call wrong right and black white?

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

Understood aright, these are the noblest and truest of words, but they arecommonly misinterpreted, and they have done much harm. To love and standby a friend who has done wrong is a fine thing; but it would be verydifferent to abet him in his wrong-doing and assure him that he had doneright. 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 dueexercise of our judgment in deciding whether she is right or wrong, or theprivilege of exerting our utmost power to make her do right. 

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

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

To-day men and women living in intolerable industrial conditions arepanting for freedom--the freedom that seems to them just now moredesirable than aught else in the world. All this the flag stands for, butit stands for much more. Under its folds we are entitled to live our ownlives in the fullest way compatible with the exercise of the sameprivilege 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 wehave it all, though we may not always take advantage of it. The people whogroan under an industrial yoke do so because they do not choose to exertthe power given them by law, under the flag, to throw it off. Theboss-ridden city is boss-ridden only because it is satisfied to be so. Thegeneration that is throttled by trusts and monopolies may at any timeeffect a peaceful revolution. The flag gives us freedom, but even a man'seternal salvation cannot be forced upon him against his will. 

Another thing for which the flag stands is justice--the "square deal, " asit is called by one of our Presidents. To every man shall come sooner orlater, under its folds, that which he deserves. This means largely "handsoff, " and is but one of the aspects of freedom, or liberty, since if we donot interfere with a man, what happens to him is a consequence of what heis and what he does. If we oppress him, or interfere with him, he getsless than he merits; and if, on the contrary we coddle him and give himprivileges, he may get more than his due. 

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

This sense of the removal of bonds, of sudden release and the entry intofree space, is well put by a poet of our own, Henry Van Dyke, when hesings, 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 becomesnecessary. 

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

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

Northward, across the Canadian border, good men[11] are striving even nowto keep us in peace and to assure peace to a neighbor severely torn byinternal conflict. Can any of us doubt that our good friend andfellow-citizen--nay, can anyone doubt that our neighbors of the SouthernContinent--are doing their best to save human lives, to preserve our youngmen and the young men of Mexico to build and operate machines, to raisecrops and to rebuild and beautify cities, instead of sending them to fillsoldiers' 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 willgive strength and effect to their decisions will be the possibility offorce, exerted in a righteous cause, symbolized by the flag? Who can besorry that back of the flag there are earnest men; nay, that there areships there, and guns? One need not be a Jingo; one can hate war and lovepeace with all one's heart and yet rejoice that the flag symbolizesauthority--the ability to back up a decision without which the mind itselfcannot 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 tosay that it stands for peace; for it is by force only, or by thepossibility of it, that peace is assured and maintained. 

These are a few of the many things for which our flag of the Stars andStripes stands. We are right to doff our hats when it passes; we are rightto love it and to reverence it, for in so doing we are reverencing union, patriotism, liberty and justice. That it shall never become an emptysymbol; that it shall never wave over a land disunited, animated by hate, shackled by indifference and feebleness, permeated by injustice, unable toexert that salutary strength which alone can preserve peace without andwithin--this is for us to see and for our children and grandchildren. Wemust not only exercise that "eternal vigilance" of which the fathersspoke, but we must be eternally ready, eternally active. The Star-SpangledBanner! Long may it wave over a land whose sons and daughters are bothfree and brave--free because they are brave, and brave because they arefree, and both because they are true children of that eternal fatherwithout 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 bedescribed, briefly but comprehensively, by saying that it has becomepredominantly a social institution; that is, that its primary concern isnow 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 nomeaning were it never to be used; yet in the old libraries the collectionand preservation of the books was primary and their use secondary, whereasthe modern institution exists primarily for public service, the collectionof the books, their preservation, and whatever is done to them beingdirected 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 nocongregation, a city without citizens--all are unthinkable. We may betterrealize the change in our conception of the public library by noting thatit has taken its place among bodies of this type. A modern library with noreaders is unthinkable; it is no library, as we now understand the word;though it be teeming with books, housed in a palace, well cataloged andproperly manned. 

It is no longer possible to question this view of the library as a socialinstitution--a means of rendering general service to the widest public. Wehave to deal not with theories of what the library ought to be, but, withfacts indicating what it actually is; and we have only to look about us torealize that the facts give the fullest measure of support to what I havejust said. The library is a great distributing agency, the commodities inwhich it deals being ideas and its customers the citizens at large, whopay, through the agency of taxation, for what they receive. Thisdemocratic and civic view of the public library's functions, however, doesnot commend itself to those who are not in sympathy with democraticideals. In a recent address, a representative librarian refers to it as"the commercial traveler theory" of the library. The implication, ofcourse, is that it is an ignoble or unworthy theory. I have no objectionto accepting the phrase, for in my mind it has no such connotation. Thecommercial traveler has done the world service which the library shouldemulate rather than despise. He is the advance guard of civilization. Tospeak but of our own country and of its recent years, he is responsiblefor much of our improvement in transit facilities and hotelaccommodations. Personally, he is becoming more and more acceptable. Thebest of our educated young men are going into commerce, and in commerceto-day no one can reach the top of the ladder who has not proved hisefficiency "on the road. " Would that we could place men of his type at thehead of all our libraries!

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

Now, without the people to whom he distributed his wares, Homer would havebeen 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 breathof 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 efficiencyof a public institution like the public library? Such an institution is, first of all, a medium through which the community does something foritself. The community employs and supports it, and at the same time isserved by it. To use another homely illustration, which I am sure will notplease those who object to comparing great things with small, this type ofrelationship is precisely what we find in domestic service. A cook or ahousemaid has a dual relation to the mistress of the house, who is at thesame time her employer and the person that she directly serves. This sortof relation does not obtain, for instance, in the case of a railroademploye, who is responsible to one set of persons and serves another. Thepublic library is established and maintained by a given community in orderthat it may perform certain service for that same community directly. Itseems to me that this dual relationship ought to make for efficiency. Ifit does not, it is because its existence and significance are not alwaysrealized. The cook knows that if she does not cook to suit her mistressshe will lose her job--the thing works almost automatically. If therailroad employe does not serve the public satisfactorily there is no suchimmediate reaction, although I do not deny that the public displeasure mayultimately reach the railroad authorities and through them the employe. Inmost public institutions the reaction is necessarily somewhat indirect. The post office is a public institution, but public opinion must act on itgenerally through the channels of Congressional legislation, which takestime. Owing to this fact, very few postmen, for instance, realize that thepersons to whom they deliver letters are also their employers. In alllibraries the machinery of reaction is not the same. In St. Louis, forinstance, the library receives the proceeds of a tax voted directly by thepeople; in New York City it receives an appropriation voted by the Boardof Apportionment, whose members are elected by the people. The St. LouisPublic Library is therefore one step nearer the control of the people thanthe New York Public Library. If we could imagine the management of eitherlibrary to become so objectionable as to make its abolition desirable, apetition for a special election could remove public support in St. Louisvery soon. In New York the matter might have to become an issue in ageneral election, at which members of a Board of Apportionment should beelected under pledge to vote against the library's appropriation. Nevertheless, in both cases there is ultimate popular control. Owing tothis dual relation, the public can promote the efficiency of the libraryin two ways--by controlling it properly and by its attitude toward theservice that is rendered. Every member of the public, in fact, is relatedto the library somewhat as a railway stockholder, riding on a train, isrelated to the company. He is at once boss and beneficiary. Let us seefirst what the public can do for its library through its relation ofcontrol. Besides the purse-strings, which we have seen are sometimes helddirectly by the public and sometimes by its elected representatives, wemust consider the governing board of the institution--its trustees ordirectors. These may be elected by the people or appointed by an electedofficer, such as the mayor, or chosen by an elected body, such as the citycouncil or the board of education. 

Let us take the purse-strings first. Does your public library get enoughpublic money to enable it to do the work that it ought to do? What is thegeneral impression about this in the community? What does the libraryboard think? What does the librarian think? What do the members of hisstaff say? What has the library's annual report to say about it? It is notat all a difficult matter for the citizen to get information on thissubject and to form his own opinion regarding it. Yet it is an unusualthing to find a citizen who has either the information or awell-considered opinion. The general impression always seems to be thatthe library has plenty of money--rather more, in fact, than it canlegitimately use. It is probably well for the library, under thesecircumstances, that the public control of its purse-strings is indirect. If the citizens of an average American city had to go to the pollsannually and vote their public library an appropriation, I am sure thatmost libraries would have to face a very material reduction of theirincome. 

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

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

Inadequacy of support is responsible for more library delinquency than theaverage citizen imagines. Many a librarian is deservedly condemned for theunsatisfactory condition of his institution when his fault is not, as hisdetractors think, failure to see what should be done, or lack of abilityto do it, so much as inability to raise funds to do it with. This isdoubtless a fault, and its possessor should suffer, but how about theequally guilty accessories? How about the city authorities who have failedto vote the library adequate support? How about the board of trustees whohave accepted such a situation without protest? And what is more to ourpurpose here, how about the citizens who have limited their efforts topointing out the cracks in the edifice, with not a bit of constructivework in propping it up and making possible its restoration to strength andsoundness?

In conversation with a friend, not long ago, I referred to the financiallimitations of our library's work, and said that we could add to itgreatly and render more acceptable service if our income were larger. Heexpressed great surprise, and said: "Why, I thought you had all the moneyyou want; your income must be all of $100, 000 a year. " Now, our incomeactually is about $250, 000, but how could I tell him that? I judiciouslychanged the subject. 

Let us look next, if you please, at the library board and examine some ofits functions. There appears to be much public misapprehension of theduties of this body, and such misapprehension assumes various and opposingforms. Some appear to think that the librarian is responsible for all thatis done in the library and that his board is a perfunctory body. Othersseem to believe that the board is the direct administrative head of thelibrary, in all of its working details and that the librarian is itsexecutive in the limited sense of doing only those things that he is toldto do. Unfortunately there are libraries that are operated in each ofthese ways, but neither one relationship nor the other, nor anymodification of either, is the ideal one between a librarian and hisboard. The board is supreme, of course, but it is a body of non-expertswho have employed an expert to bring about certain results. They ought toknow what they want, and what they have a right to expect, and if theirexpert does not give them this, the relation between him and them shouldterminate; but if they are men of sense they will not attempt to dictatemethods or supervise details. They are the delegated representatives ofthe great public, which owns the library and operates it for a definitepurpose. It is this function of the board as the representative of thepublic that should be emphasized here. Has the public a definite idea ofwhat it wants from the public library, and of what is reasonable for it toask? If so, is it satisfied that it is represented by a board that is ofthe same mind? The citizens may be assured that the composition of thelibrary board rests ultimately upon its will. If the board is elective, this is obvious; if appointive, the appointing officer or body wouldhardly 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 publiclibrary is public property, owned and controlled by the citizens. Everycitizen, therefore, should be interested in setting standards for it andplaying his part toward making it conform to them--in seeing that itsgoverning body represents him in also recognizing those standards andtrying to maintain them--in laboring for such a due apportionment of thepublic funds as shall not make an attempt to live up to such standards amere farce. 

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

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

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 likethis the citizen is both an owner and a beneficiary. He has duties andprivileges in both capacities, but he sometimes acts the owner in thewrong place. The man on the warship was doubtless an owner, but at thatparticular moment he was only a visitor, subject to whatever rules mightgovern visitors; and he should have acted as such. Every citizen is a partowner of the public library; he should never forget that fact. We haveseen how he may effectively assert his ownership and control. But when heenters the library to use it his role is that of beneficiary, and heshould act as such. He may so act and at the same time be of the greatestservice to the institution which he, as a member of the public, hascreated and is maintaining. 

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

Before the present era there were regulations in all institutions thatseemed to be framed merely to exasperate--to put the public in its placeand chasten its spirit. There are now no such rules in good libraries. Hewho thinks there are may find that there is a difference of opinionbetween him and those whom he has set in charge of the library regardingwhat is arbitrary and what is necessary; but at any rate he will discoverthat the animating spirit of modern library authority is to give all anequal share in what it has to offer, and to restrain one man no more thanis necessary to insure to his brother the measure of privilege to whichall are equally entitled. 

Another way in which the citizen, in his capacity of the library'sbeneficiary, can aid it and improve its service is his treatment of itsadministrators. Librarians are very human: they react quickly and surelyto praise or blame, deserved or undeserved. Blame is what they chieflyget. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes not. But the occasions onwhich some citizen steps in and says, "Well done, good and faithfulservant, " are rare indeed. The public servant has to interpret silence aspraise; so sure is he that the least slip will be caught and condemned bya vigilant public. No one can object to discriminating criticism; it is apotent 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 wonderfulstimulant. No service is possible without the men and women who render it;and the quality of service depends, more than we often realize, on thespirit 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 thecounter and complained loudly because the library would not send her apostal 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 wasmerely enforcing a rule common, so far as I know, to all American publiclibraries; 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 occupiedin this useless business spelled delay to half a dozen other readers, whowere waiting their turn. Finally, one of them, a quiet little old lady inblack, spoke up as follows: "Some of us hereabouts think that we owe agreat debt of gratitude to this library. Its assistants have renderedservice to us that we can never repay. I am glad to have an opportunity todo something in return, and it therefore gives me pleasure to pay the centabout which you are taking up this young lady's time, and ours. " Sosaying, she laid the coin on the desk and the line moved on. I have alwaysremembered these two points of view as typical of two kinds of libraryusers. Their respective effects on the temper and work of a library staffneed, 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 beenplaying 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, physiciststell 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 interactingthings in this world are either approaching each other or receding fromeach other. So it should be with library and public. A forward movement onthe one hand should necessarily involve one to meet it. 

The peculiarity of our modern temper is our hunger for facts--ourconfidence that when the facts are known we shall find a way to deal withthem, and that until the facts are known we shall not be able to act--noteven to think. Our ancestors thought and acted sometimes on premises thatseem to us frightfully flimsy--they tried, as Dean Swift painted them inhis immortal satire, to get sunbeams from cucumbers. There are somesunbeam-chasers among us to-day, but even they recognize the need of realcucumbers to start with; the imaginary kind will not do. I recently hearda great teacher of medicine say that the task of the modern physician ismerely to ascertain the facts on which the intelligent public is to act. How different that sounds from the dicta of the medicine of a pastgeneration! It is the same everywhere: we are demanding an accuratesurvey--an ascertainment of the facts in any field in which action, basedon inference and judgment, is seen to be necessary. Now the library isnothing more nor less than a storehouse of recorded facts. It is becomingso more truly and more fully every day, thereby adjusting itself to themodern temper of which I have already spoken. The library and its usersare coming more closely together, in sympathy, in aims and in action, thanever before--partly a result and partly a justification for that Homericmethod of popularizing it which has been characterized and condemned ascommercial. The day when the librarian, or the professor, or the clergymancould 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 thecontinent of Europe. Not civilizations, as some pessimists are lamenting, but the forces antagonistic to civilization are there destroying oneanother, and there is hope that a purified democracy will arise from thewreckage. May our American civilization never have to run the gantlet ofsuch a terrible trial! Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the hope forthe future efficiency of all our public institutions, including thelibrary, lies in the success of democracy, and that depends on theexistence and improvement of the conditions in whose absence democracynecessarily fails. Foremost among these is the homogeneity of thepopulation. The people among whom democracy succeeds must have similarstandards, ideas, aims and abilities. Democracy may exist in a pack ofwolves, but not in a group that is half wolves and half men. Either thewolves 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 irreconcilableelements there can be no true democracy. And the same oneness of visionand purpose that conduces to the success of democracy will also bring toperfection such great democratic institutions as the library, which havealready borne such noteworthy fruit among us just because we arehomogeneous beyond all other nations on the earth. And here progress is byaction and reaction, as we see it so often in the world. The unity of aimsand abilities that makes democracy and democratic institutions possible isitself facilitated and increased by the work of those institutions. Themore work the library does, the more its ramifications multiply, and thefurther they extend, the more those conditions are favored that make thecontinuance of the library possible. In working for others, it is workingfor itself, and every additional bit of strength and sanity that it takeson does but enable it to work for others the more. And if the democracywhose servant it is will but realize that it has grown up as a part ofthat American system to which we are all committed--to which we owe allthat we are and in which we must place all our hopes for the future--thenneither democracy nor library will have aught to fear. Democracy will haveits "true and laudable" service from the library, and the library in itsturn 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 clubcomposed of women. The bonds between the modern public library and themodern woman's club have been particularly strong in this country. The twoinstitutions have grown up together, making their way against suspicion, contempt and hostility, aided by the same public demand, and now, whenboth are recognized as elements in the intellectual strength of ournation, they are rendering mutual service. The club turns to the librarydaily. Hitherto the library has turned to the club only in someemergency--a bill to be passed, an appropriation to be made, anadministration to be purified. I have tried to show you how, apart fromthese great services, which no one would think of minimizing, the women ofthis country, as citizens, can uphold the hands of the library daily. Oursis a government of public opinion, and in the formation of that opinionthere 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 toboth your aristocracy and your democracy, I feel, then, that I have notgone 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 modesof action from whatever source we find them, combining them and fusingthem into what will one day become American thoughts and standards. We arethus combining the most varied and opposing things--things that it wouldseem impossible to put together. Take our modern American tendency ingovernment, for instance. Could there be two things more radicallydifferent than despotism and democracy?--the rule of the one and the ruleof the many? And yet I believe that we are taking steps toward a verysuccessful combination of the two. Such a combination is essentiallyancient. No despotism can hold its own without the consent of thegoverned. That consent may be unwilling and sooner or later it is thenwithheld, with the result that a revolution takes place and the despotloses his throne--the oldest form of the recall. Every despotism is thustempered by revolution, and Anglo-Saxon communities have been ready toexercise such a privilege on the slightest sign that a despotic tendencywas creeping into their government. 

It is not remarkable, then, that our own Federal government, which isessentially a copy of the British government of its day, should haveincorporated this feature of the recall, which in England had just passedfrom its revolutionary to its legal stage. It was beginning to berecognized then that a vote of the people's representatives could recall amonarch, and the English monarchy is now essentially elective. But to makeassurance doubly sure, the British government, in its later evolution, hasbeen practically separated from the monarch's person, and any governmentmay be simply overthrown or "recalled" by a vote of lack of confidence inthe House of Commons, followed, if need be, by a defeat in a generalelection. We have not yet adopted this feature. Our President is still thehead of our government, and he and all other elected Federal officersserve their terms out, no matter whether the people have confidence inthem or not. But the makers of our Constitution improved on the Britishgovernment as they found it. They made the term of the executive fouryears instead of life and systematized the "recall" by providing forimpeachment proceedings--a plan already recognized in Britain in the caseof certain administrative and judicial officers. 

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

In following out these ideas in later years, we are gradually evolving aform of government that is both more despotic and more democratic. We arecombining the legislative and executive power in the hands of a fewpersons, hampering them very little in their exercise of it, and making itpossible to recall them by direct vote of the body of citizens thatelected them. I think we may describe the tendency of public thought ingovernmental matters as a tendency toward a despotism under legalizeddemocratic control. It may be claimed, I think, that the best features ofdespotism and democracy may thus be utilized, with a minimum of the evilsof 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, andnot as persons who govern or help to govern. It is pleasant, perhaps, tohave plenty of servants to wait upon one, but surely health, physical, mental and moral, waits on him who does most things for himself. I onceheard Lincoln Steffens say: "What we want is not 'Good Government'; it is_Self_-Government. " But is it not possible to get the advantage ofgovernment by a few, with its possibilities of continuous policy and itsfreedom from "crowd-psychology, " with its skillful utilization of expertknowledge, while admitting the public to full knowledge of what is goingon, and full ultimate control of it? We evidently think so, and our presenttendencies are evidence that we are attempting something of the kind. Ourbelief seems to be that if we elect our despot and are able to recall himwe shall have to keep tab on him pretty closely, and that the knowledge ofstatecraft that will thus be necessary to us will be no less than if wepersonally took part in legislation and administration--probably far morethan if we simply went through the form of delegating our responsibilitiesand 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 futurewill show; I am here discussing tendencies, not their ultimate outcome. But it would be too much to expect that this or any other eclectic policyshould be pleasing to all. 

"The real problem of collectivism, " says Walter Lippmann, "is thedifficulty of combining popular control with administrative power. .. . Theconflict between democracy and centralized authority . .. Is the line uponwhich the problems of collectivism will be fought out. "

In selecting elements from both despotism and democracy we are displeasingthe adherents of both. There is too much despotism in the plan for oneside and too much democracy for the other. We constantly hear thecomplaint that concentrated responsibility with popular control is toodespotic, and at the same time the criticism that it is too democratic. Toput your city in the hands of a small commission, perhaps of a citymanager, 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 issaid to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is. Only it ispossible that by combining these two poisons--this acid and thisalkali--in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities. Atany 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 inquite a different field--that of morals. Among the settlers of our countrywere both Puritans and Cavaliers--representatives in England of two moralstandards that have contended there for centuries and still exist thereside by side. We in America are attempting to mix them with some measureof success. This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tellsin his "American Commonwealth, " who said that American women were"_furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm_"--frightfully free and frightfullypious! In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritanstandards. Of course those who do not understand what is going on thinkthat we are either too free or too pious. We are neither; we are trying togive and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiencyand restraint where restraint is indicated. We have not arrived at a finalstandard. 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 takean obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, tocombine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity ofmarriage. We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble, there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than ifthere are legal ways of dissolving it. 

Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinaryconversation 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 theyconsider insufficient causes. In the former case we seem to them"frightfully pious"; in the latter, "frightfully free. " They are right; weare 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 workingtoward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundreddifferent ones. Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in ourarchitecture. A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico, has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any morethan he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird's nest for awoodchuck hole. 

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

We used to think for instance that in music the ordinary diatonic majorscale, with its variant minor, was a fact of nature. We knew vaguely thatthe ancient Greeks had other scales, and we knew also that the Chinese andthe Arabs had scales so different that their music was generallydispleasing to us. But we explained this by saying that our scale wasnatural 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 ourown. We have the tonal and the semi-tonal scales and we are trying to makeuse of the Chinese, Arabic and Hindu modes. We are producing results thatsound very odd to ears that are attuned to the old-fashioned music, butour eclecticism here as elsewhere is cracking the shell of prejudice andwill doubtless lead to some good end, though perhaps we can not see ityet. 

How about education? In the first place there are, as I read the historyof education, two main methods of training youth--the individual methodand the class method. No two boys or girls are alike; no two have likereactions to the same stimulus. Each ought to have a separate teacher, forthe methods to be employed must be adapted especially to the material onwhich 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 preparefor life with and among one's fellow beings, otherwise it is worthless. This means training in class, with and among other students, where eachmind responds not to the teacher's alone but to those of its fellowpupils. 

Here are two irreconcilable requirements. In our modern systems ofeducation we are trying to respond to them as best we may, teaching inclass and at the same time giving each pupil as much personal attention aswe can. The tutorial system, now employed in Princeton University, is aninteresting 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 ofarchitectural styles. In the old college days, not so very long ago, Latin, Greek, and mathematics made up the curriculum. Now our boys choosefrom a thousand subjects grouped in a hundred courses. In our commonschools we have introduced so many new subjects as to crowd thecurriculum. Signs of a reaction are evident. I am alluding to the matterhere only as another example of our modern passion for wide selection andfor the combination of things that apparently defy amalgamation. 

What of religion? Prof. George E. Woodberry, in his interesting book onNorth 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 themoment his classification I believe that the facts show an effort tocombine the two types in the United States. Many of the Christiandenominations that Woodberry would class as "simple"--those that beganwith a total absence of ritual, are becoming ritualized. Creeds oncesimple are becoming complicated with interpretation and comment. On theother hand we may see in the Roman Catholic Church and among the so-called"High Church" Episcopalians a disposition to adopt some of the methodsthat have hitherto distinguished other religious bodies. Consider, forexample, some of the religious meetings held by the Paulist Fathers in NewYork, characterized by popular addresses and the singing of simple hymns. As another example of the eclectic spirit of churches in America we maypoint to the various efforts at combination or unity, with such results asthe Federation of the Churches of Christ in America--an ambitious name, not yet justified by the facts--the proposed amalgamation of several ofthe most powerful Protestant bodies in Canada, and the accomplished factof the University of Toronto--an institution whose constituent collegesare controlled by different religious denominations, including the RomanCatholic Church. I may also mention the present organization of the NewYork Public Library, many of whose branch libraries were contributionsfrom religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and theEpiscopalians. All these now work together harmoniously. I know of nothingof this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified increditing it to the present American tendency to eclecticism. 

Turn for a moment to philosophy. What is the philosophical system mostwidely known at present as American? Doubtless the pragmatism of WilliamJames. No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regardingphilosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; butpragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system. It is based on thecharacter of results. Is something true or false? I will tell you when Ifind 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 thepeasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Junoor 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 ofChristianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill ofpragmatism. Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true. I amnot criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely assertingthat it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue inthe United States. 

It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a listof all the domains in which this eclecticism--this tendency to select, combine and blend--has cropped out among us Americans of today. I havereserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested--thePublic Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree. The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, awider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in anyother part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users lookat us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine underthe activities of one public institution; they shudder at ourextravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they arecompelled to foot the bills for what we do. But the taxpayers do not seemto mind. They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing. Whatbothers them is that we do not try to do more. When we began timidly toadd branch libraries to our system they asked us why we did not build andequip them faster; when we placed a few books on open shelves theydemanded that we treat our whole stock in the same way; when we set asidea corner for the children they forced us to fit up a whole room and toplace such a room in every building, large or small. We have responded toevery such demand. Each response has cost money and the public has paidthe bill. Apparently librarians and public are equally satisfied. Weshould not be astonished, for this merely shows that the library issubject to the same laws and tendencies as all other things American. 

Hence it comes about that whereas in a large library a century ago therewere simply stored books with no appliances to do anything but keep themsafe, we now find in library buildings all sorts of devices to facilitatethe quick and efficient use of the books both in the building and in thereaders' homes, together with other devices to stimulate a desire to usebooks among those who have not yet felt it; to train children to use andlove books; to interest the public in things that will lead to the use ofbooks. This means that many of the things in a modern library seem to anold-fashioned librarian and an old-fashioned reader like unwarrantedextensions or even usurpations. In our own Central building you will findcollections of postal cards and specimens of textile fabrics, an index tocurrent lectures, exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room, withfree note-paper and envelopes, a class of young women studying to belibrarians, 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 ofthese things I believe, would you have found in a large library fiftyyears ago. And yet the citizens of St. Louis seem to be cheerful and arenot worrying over the future. We are eclectic, but we are choosing theelements 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 stimulatedby books and that produce more books, to the training that instils intothe rising generation a love for books. The book is still at thefoundation of the library, even if its walls have received somearchitectural embellishment of a different type. 

When anyone objects to the introduction into the library of what thecolleges call "extra-curriculum activities, " I prefer to explain andjustify it in this larger way, rather than to take up each activity byitself and discuss its reasonableness--though this also may be undertakenwith the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in theUnited States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its ownbeing; it has been following the whole stream of American development. Youcan call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simplydrifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submitto be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In sodoing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but fatigue, orhe may use the force of the stream, as far as he may, to reach his owngoal. I like to think that this is what many American institutions aredoing, our libraries among them. They are using the present tendency toeclecticism in an effort toward wider public service. When, in acommunity, there seems to be a need for doing some particular thing, thelibrary, if it has the equipment and the means, is doing that thingwithout inquiring too closely whether there is logical justification forlinking it with the library's activities rather than with some others. Note, now, how this desirable result is aided by our prevailing Americantendency toward eclecticism. Suppose precisely the same conditions toobtain in England, or France, or Italy, the admitted need for someactivity, the ability of the library and the inability of any otherinstitution, to undertake it. I submit that the library would be extremelyunlikely to move in the matter, simply from the lack of the tendency thatwe are discussing. That tendency gives a flexibility, almost a fluidity, which under a pressure of this kind, yields and ensures an outlet fordesirable energy along a line of least resistance. 

The Englishman and the American, when they are arguing a case of thiskind, assume each the condition of affairs that obtains in his ownland--the rigidity on the one hand, the fluidity on the other. They assumeit without stating it or even thoroughly understanding it, and the resultis that neither can understand the conclusions of the other. The fact isthat they are both right. I seriously question whether it would be rightor proper for a library in a British community to do many of the thingsthat libraries are doing in American communities. I may go further and saythat the rigidity of British social life would make it impossible for thelibrary to achieve these things. But it is also true that the fluidity ofAmerican social life makes it equally impossible for the library towithstand the pressure that is brought to bear on it here. To yield is inits case right and proper and a failure of response would be wrong andimproper. 

It is usually assumed by the British critic of American libraries thattheir peculiarities are due to the temperament of the American librarian. We make a similar assumption when we discuss British libraries. I do notdeny that the librarians on both sides have had something to do with it, but the determining factor has been the social and temperamentaldifferences between the two peoples. Americans are fluid, experimental, eclectic, and this finds expression in the character of their institutionsand in the way these are administered and used. 

Take if you please the reaction of the library on the two sides of thewater to the inevitable result of opening it to home-circulation--thenecessity of knowing whether a given book is or is not on the shelves. TheAmerican response was to open the shelves, the British, to create anadditional piece of machinery--the indicator. These two results might havebeen predicted in advance by one familiar with the temper of the twopeoples. It has shown itself in scores of instances, in the front yards ofresidences, for instance--walled off in England and open to the street inthe United States. 

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

This rapid review of modern American tendencies, however confusing theimpression that it may give, will at any rate convince us, I think, of onething--the absurdity of objecting to anything whatever on the ground thatit is un-American. We are the most receptive people in the world. We "takeour 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 nothappen to suit any of us, the favorite method of attack is to denounce itas "un-American. " Pretty nearly every element of our present social fabrichas been thus denounced, at one time or another, and as it goes onchanging, every change is similarly attacked. 

The makers of our Constitution were good conservative Americans--much tooconservative, some of our modern radicals say--yet they provided foraltering that Constitution, and set absolutely no limits on thealterations that might be made, provided that they were made in the mannerspecified in the instrument. We can make over our government into amonarchy tomorrow, if we want, or decree that no one in Chicago shall weara silk hat on New Year's Day. It was recently the fashion to complain thatthe amendment of the Constitution has become so difficult as to be nowpractically a dead letter. And yet we have done so radical a thing as tochange absolutely the method of electing senators of the United States;and we did it as easily and quietly as buying a hat--vastly more easilythan changing a cook. The only obstacle to changing our Constitution, nomatter how radically and fundamentally, is the opposition of the peoplethemselves. As soon as they want the change, it comes quickly and simply. Changes like these are not un-American if the American people like themwell enough to make them. They, and they alone, are the judges of whatpeculiarities they shall adopt as their own customs and characteristics. So that when we hear that this or that is un-American, we may agree onlyin so far as it is not yet an American characteristic. That we do not carefor it today is no sign that we may not take up with it tomorrow, and itis 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 laterdays of the Roman empire when the peoples of the remotest parts of theknown world, with their arts, customs and manners, were all to be found inthe imperial city--when the gods of Greece, Syria and Egypt wereworshipped side by side with those of old Rome, where all sorts of exoticart, philosophy, literature and politics took root and flourished. That isusually regarded as a period of decadence, and it was certainly aprecursor of the empire's fall. When we consider that it wascontemporaneous with great material prosperity and with the spread ofluxury and a certain loosening of the moral fiber, such as we areexperiencing 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 oftenonly a period of readjustment. The Roman empire as a political entity wentout of existence long ago, but Rome's influence on our art, law, literature and government is still powerful. Her so-called "fall" wasreally not a fall but a changing into something else. In fact, if we takeBergson'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. Atthe time of which we speak the visible part of the change wasaccelerated--that is all. In like manner each one of you as an individualis not a fixed entity. You are changing every instant and the realityabout you is the change, not what you see with the eye or photograph withthe camera--that is merely a stage through which you pass and in which youdo not stay--not for the thousand millionth part of the smallestrecognizable instant. So our current American life and thought is notsomething that stands still long enough for us to describe it. Even as wewrite the description it has changed to another phase. And the phenomenaof transition just now are particularly noticeable--that is all. We maycall them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new andmore 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 simplegeneralizations of our ancestors. "

This is quite true, and so, in place of simplicity we are introducingcomplexity, very largely by selection and combination of simple elementsevolved in former times to fit earlier conditions. Whether organicrelations can be established among these elements, so that there shall oneday issue from the welter something well-rounded, something American, fitting American conditions and leading American aspirations forward andupward, 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 directthe 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 ofspecial moment. When we send forth graduates from our schools and collegesdevoted to general education, while the thought of failure may bedisquieting or embarrassing, we know that no special danger can result, except to the man who has failed. The college graduate who has neglectedhis opportunities has thrown away a chance, but he is no menace to hisfellows. Affairs take on a different complexion in the technical orprofessional school. The poorly trained engineer, physician or lawyer, isan injury to the community. Failure to train an engineer may involve thefuture failure of a structure, with the loss of many lives. Failure totrain a doctor means that we turn loose on the public one who will killoftener than he will cure. Failure to train a lawyer means wills that canbe broken, contracts that will not hold, needless litigation. 

Congressman Kent, of California, has coined a satisfactory word for thissort 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, andhe is right, that malemployment is a worse thing. All these poor engineersand doctors and lawyers are busily engaged, and every thing on the surfaceseems to be going on well. But as a matter of fact, the world would bebetter off if each one of them should stop working and never do anotherstroke. It would pay the community to support them in idleness. 

I have always considered pharmacy to be one of the occupations in whichmalemployment is particularly objectionable. If you read Homer badly itaffects no one but yourself. If you think Vera Cruz is in Italy and thatthe Amazon River runs into the Arctic Ocean, your neighbor is as well offas 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 thatthe Egyptians displayed a skeleton at their banquets--because warnings area tonic to the soul--but also because, if we are to credit much that wesee in general literature, including especially the daily paper and thepopular magazine, _all_ druggists are malemployed. And if it would reallybe better for the community that you should not enter upon the professionfor which you have been trained, now, of course, is the time for you toknow it. 

There seems to be a widespread impression--an assumption--that the day ofthe drug is over--that the therapeutic of the future are to be concernedalong with hygiene and sanitation, with physical exercise, diet, andmechanical operations. The very word "drug" has come to have anobjectionable connection that did not belong to it fifty years ago. Evensome of the druggists themselves, it seems to me, are a little ashamed ofthe drug part of their occupation. Their places of business appear to benews-agencies, refreshment parlors, stationery stores--the drugs are "onthe side, " or rather in the rear. Sometimes, I am told, the proprietors ofthese places know nothing at all about pharmacy, but employ a prescriptionclerk who is a capable pharmacist. Here the druggist has stepped down fromhis 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 beginningto accept the valuation that some people are putting upon his services tothe community. 

Now these things affect me, not as a physician nor as a pharmacist, for Iam neither, but they do touch me as a student of physics and chemistry andas one whose business and pleasure it has been for many years to watch thedevelopment of these and other sciences. The fact that I am addressing youthis evening may be taken, I suppose, as evidence that you may beinterested in this point of view. The action of most substances on thehuman organism is a function of their chemical constitution. Has thatchemical constitution changed? It is one of the most astonishingdiscoveries of our age that many, perhaps all, substances undergospontaneous 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 reasonto suppose that the alkaloids, for instance, or the salts of potash oriron, differ today in any respect from those of a century ago. How aboutthe other factor in the reaction--the human organism and its properties?That our bodily properties have changed in the past admits of no doubt. Wehave developed up to the point where we are at present. Here, however, evolution seems to have left us, and it is now devoting its attentionexclusively to our mental and moral progress. Judging from what is nowgoing 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 adose of opium, or ipecac, or aspirin, the effect would have been differentfrom that experienced today by one of you. This is what a physicist or achemist 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 bethe same. If we still desire to bring about the action and if there is nobetter way to do it, we must use the drug, and there is still need for thedruggist. As a matter of fact, the number of drugs at your disposal todayis vastly greater than ever before, largely owing to the labor, and theingenuity, of the analytical chemist. And there are still great classes ofcompounds of whose existence the chemist is assured, but which he has noteven had time to form, much less to investigate. Among these may lurkremedies 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 businessfrom lack of stock, whether we regard quantity or variety. To what, then, must we attribute the growth of the feeling that the treatment of diseaseby the administration of drugs is on the decline? From the standpoint of alayman it seems to be due to two facts, or at least to have been stronglyaffected by them: (1) The discovery and rapid development of othertherapeutic measures, such as those dependent on surgical methods, or onthe use of immunizing serums, or on manipulations such as massage, or ondiet, or even on mental suggestion; and (2) the very increase in thenumber and variety of available drugs alluded to above, which hasintroduced to the public many new and only partially tried substances, theresults of whose use has often been unexpectedly injurious, including aconsiderable number of new habit-forming drugs whose ravages are becomingknown to the public. 

The development of therapeutic measures that are independent of drugs hasbeen coincident with popular emancipation from the mere superstition ofdrug-administration. The older lists of approved remedies were loaded withitems that had no curative properties at all, except by suggestion. Theywere purely magical--the thumb-nails of executed criminals, the hair ofblack cats, the ashes of burned toads and so on. Even at this moment yourpharmacopoeia contains scores of remedies that are without effect or thatdo not produce the effects credited to them. I am relying on hightherapeutical authority for this statement. Now when the sick man is toldby his own physician to discard angleworm poultices, and herbs plucked inthe dark of the moon, on which he had formerly relied, it is any wonderthat he has ended by being suspicious also of calomel and ipecac, withwhich they were formerly classed? And when the man who believed that hereceived benefit from some of these magical remedies is told that theresult was due to auto-suggestion, is it remarkable that he should fall aneasy prey next day to the Christian Scientist who tells him that theeffects of calomel and ipecac are due to nothing else than this samesuggestion? 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 drugsaltogether, and further, it creates, even among those who continue to usedrugs, an atmosphere favorable to the belief that they are back numbers, on the road to disuse. Just here comes in the second factor to persuadethe layman, from what has come under his own observation, that drugs areinjurious, dangerous, even fatal. Newly discovered chemical compounds withvaluable properties, have been adopted and used in medicine before thenecessary time had elapsed to disclose the fact that they possessed alsoother properties, more elusive than the first, but as potent for harm asthese were for good. Many were narcotics or valuable anesthetics, local orotherwise, which have proved to be the creators of habits more terriblethan the age-long enemies of mankind, alcohol and opium. When the manwhose wife takes a coal-tar derivative for headache finds that it stillsher heart forever, the incident affects his whole opinion of drugs. Whenthe patient for whom one of the new drugs has been prescribed by apractitioner without knowledge of his idiosyncrasies reacts to it fatally, it is slight consolation to his survivors that his case is described inprint under the heading, "A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning. " When amother sees her son go to the bad by taking cocaine, or heroin, or someother drug of whose existence she was ignorant a dozen years ago, she maybe pardoned for believing that all drugs, or at least all newly discovereddrugs, are tools of the devil. 

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

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

"A workman was tamping a charge of blasting-powder with a crowbar, whenthe charge went off prematurely and the bar was driven through theunfortunate man's body, so that part of it protruded on either side: Alocal physician was summoned, and after some study he pronounced asfollows: '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!' Inthis emergency, " the lawyer went on to say, "Dr. Jones doubtless wouldhave prescribed _ice_. "

Now the pill to melt the crowbar may stand for our former excessive andabsurd regard for drugs. The application of ice in the same emergency maylikewise represent a universal resort to hydrotherapy. Neither of them islogical. There is place for each, but there are emergencies that can notbe met with either. Still, to abandon one method of treatment simplybecause additional methods have proved to be valuable, would be as absurdas to give up talking upon the invention of writing or to prohibit theraising of corn on land that will produce wheat. 

No: we shall doubtless continue to use drugs and we shall continue to needthe druggist. What can he do to make his business more valued andrespected, more useful to the public and more profitable to himself? Forthere can be no doubt that he will finally succeed in attaining all thesedesirable results together, or fail in all. Here and there we may find aman who is making a fortune out of public credulity and ignorance, or, onthe other hand, one who is giving the public more service than it pays forand ruining himself in the process; but in general and on the averagepersonal and public interest run pretty well hand in hand. Henry Fordmakes 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 onemight not find in some other oil or grease. 

What then, I repeat, must the pharmacist do to succeed, personally andprofessionally? I welcome this opportunity to tell you what I think. Myadvice comes from the outside--often the most valuable source. I have solittle to do with pharmacy, either as a profession or as a business that Istand far enough away to get a bird's-eye view. And if you think that anyadvice, based on this view, is worthless, it will be a consolation to allof 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 businessthat has gone far to turn the pharmacy into a department store. But let meurge you not to let this tendency run wild. There are side-lines thatbelong properly to pharmacy, such as all those pertaining to hygiene orsanitation; to the toilet, to bodily refreshment. I do not see why oneshould not expect to find at his pharmacist's, soap, or tooth-brushes, orsponges. I do not see why the thirsty man should not go there for mineralwater as well as the dyspeptic for pills. But I fail to see the connectionbetween pharmacy and magazines, or stationery or candy. By selling thesethe druggist puts himself at once into competition with the departmentstores. There can be no doubt about who will win out in any suchcompetition as that. But I believe there is still a place in the communityfor any special line of business if its proprietor sticks to his specialtyand makes himself a recognized expert in it. The department store spreadsitself too thin--there is no room for intensive development at any pointof its vast expanse. Its general success is due to this very fact. I amnot now speaking of the rural community where there is room only for onegeneral store selling everything that the community needs. But mystatement holds good for the city and the large town. 

Let me illustrate by an instance in which we librarians are professionallyinterested--the book store. Once every town had its book-store. Now theyare 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 itsold scholarly proprietor who knew books and the book-market; who lovedbooks and the book-business. Quarts of ink have been wasted in trying toaccount for his disappearance. The Public Library, for one thing, has beenblamed for it. I have no time now to disprove this, though it is veryclear to me that libraries help the book trade instead of hindering it. Ishall simply give you my version of the trouble. The book-dealerdisappeared, as soon as he entered into competition with the departmentstore. He put in side lines of toys, and art supplies, and cameras andcandy. He began to spread himself thin and had no time for expertconcentration on his one specialty. Thus he lost his one advantage overthe department store--his strength in the region where it was weak; and ofcourse he succumbed. If you will think for a moment of the specialbusinesses that have survived the competition of the department store, youwill see that they are precisely the ones that have resisted thistemptation to spread themselves and have been content to remain experts. Look at the men's furnishing stores. Would they have survived if they hadbegun to sell cigars and lawn-mowers? Look at the retail shoe stores, theopticians, the cigar stores, the bakers, the meat markets, theconfectioners, the restaurants of all grades! They have all to competewith the department stores, but their customers realize that they havesomething to offer that can be offered by no department store--expertservice in one line, due to some one's life-long training, experience anddevotion to the public. 

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

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

I recognize the great value and service of the department store, but I donot go there for my law or medicine; neither do I care to resort thitherfor my pharmacy. I want our separate drug stores to persist, and I wantthem to remain in charge of experts. 

And when the store deals in other things than purely therapeuticpreparations--which I have already said I think probably unavoidable, --Iwant it to present the aspect of a pharmacy that deals also in toiletpreparations and mineral water, not of an establishment for dispensingsoda-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 thepharmacy respond to it. It is the place where we naturally look in anemergency--the spot to which the victim of an accident is carrieddirectly--the one where the lady bends her steps when she feels that sheis going to faint. In hundreds of cases the drug store is our onlystandby, and it should be the druggist's business to see that it neverfails us. There are pharmacies where a telephone message brings anunfailing response; there are others to which one would as soon think ofsending an inquiry regarding a Biblical quotation. To which type, do youthink, will the public prefer to resort?

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

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

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

Gentlemen, you have chosen as your life work a profession that I believeto be indispensable to human welfare--one of enviable tradition and honorand with standing and reputation in the community that set it apart, insome degree from all others. And while I would not have you neglect thematerial success that it may bring you, I would urge you to expect this asa result rather than strive for it as an immediate end. I would have youlabor to maintain and develop the special knowledge that you have gainedin this institution, to hold up the standard of courtesy and helpfulnessunder which you can best do public service, confident that if you do thesethings, business standing and financial success will also be added untoyou. 

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 byothers, one meets with considerable difficulty. If a boy reads Mill's"Political Economy'" he is surely educating himself; but if after readingeach chapter he visits a class and answers certain questions propoundedfor the purpose of ascertaining whether he has read it at all, or has readit understandingly, then we are accustomed to transfer the credit for theeducative process to the questioner, and say that the boy has beeneducated at school or college. As a matter of fact, I think most of us areself-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 hewas self-taught. His so-called teachers assigned tasks to him and saw thathe performed them. If he did not, they subjected him to discipline. Onceor twice in a lifetime most of us have run up against a real teacher--aman or a woman that really played a major part in shaping our minds asthey now are--our stock of knowledge, our ways of thought, our methods ofdoing things. These men have stood and are still standing (though they mayhave joined the great majority long ago) athwart the stream of sensationas it passes through us, and are determining what part shall be stored up, and where; what kind of action shall ultimately result from it. Theinfluence of a good teacher spreads farther and lasts longer than that ofany other man. If his words have been recorded in books it may reachacross the seas and down the ages. 

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

So when the community educates itself, as it doubtless does and as it mustdo, 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 welearn, control is the most vital. What we are is the sum of those thingsthat we do not repress. We begin without self-repression and have to becontrolled by others. When we learn to exercise control ourselves, it isright that even our education should revert wholly to what it has longbeen in greater part--a voluntary process. 

This does not mean that at this time the pupil abandons guidance. It meansthat he is free to choose his own guides and the place and method of usingthem. Some rely wholly on experience; others are wise enough to see thatlife is too short and too narrow to acquire all that we need, and they setabout to make use also of that acquired by others. Some of these wiserones use only their companions and acquaintances; others read books. Thewisest are opportunists; they make use of all these methods as they haveoccasion. Their reading does not make them avoid the exchange of ideas byconversation, nor does the acquirement of ideas in either way precludelearning 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 actionof some kind. He who omits any of these things cannot be said to havereally lived. He cannot, it is true, fail to acquire ideas unless he is anidiot; but he may fail to acquire them broadly, and may even make themistake of thinking that he can create them in his own mind. 

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

And the man who has acquired broadly and worked over his raw material intoa product of his own, may still stop there and never do anything. Ourwhole organism is subsidiary to action and he who stops short of it hassurely failed to live. 

Our educative processes, so far, have dwelt heavily on acquirement, somewhat lightly on mental assimilation and digestion, and have leftaction almost untouched. In these two latter respects, especially, is thecommunity self-educated. 

The fact that I am saying this here, and to you, is a sufficient guarantythat I am to lay some emphasis on the part played by books in theseself-educative processes. A book is at once a carrier and a tool; ittransports the idea and plants it. It is a carrier both in time and inspace--the idea that it implants may be a foreign idea, or an ancientidea, or both. Either of its functions may for the moment be paramount; abook may bring to you ideas whose implantation your brain resists, or itmay be used to implant ideas that are already present, as when aninstructor uses his own text book. Neither of these two cases representseducation in the fullest sense. 

You will notice that I have not yet defined education. I do not intend totry, for my time is limited. But in the course of my own educativeprocesses, which I trust are still proceeding, the tendency grows strongerand stronger to insist on an intimate connection with reality in alleducation--to making it a realization that we are to do something and ayearning to be able to do it. The man who has never run up against thingsas they are, who has lived in a world of moonshine, who sees crooked andattempts what is impossible and what is useless--is he educated? I used towonder what a realist was. Now that I am becoming one myself I begin dimlyto understand. He certainly is not a man devoid of ideals, but they arereal ideals, if you will pardon the bull. 

I believe that I am in goodly company. The library as I see it has alsoset its face toward the real. What else is meant by our business branches, our technology rooms, our legislative and municipal reference departments?They mean that slow as we may be to respond to community thought and to doour part in carrying on community education, we are vastly more sensitivethan the school, which still turns up its nose at efforts like the Garysystem; than the stage, which still teaches its actors to be stagy insteadof natural; even than the producers of the very literature that we help tocirculate, who rarely know how even to represent the conversation of twohuman beings as it really is. And when a great new vehicle of popularartistic expression arises, like the moving picture, those who purvey itspend their millions to build mock cities instead of to reproduce thereality that it is their special privilege to be able to show. And theyhire stage actors to show off their staginess on the screen--staginessthat is a thousand times more stagy because its background is of wavingfoliage and glimmering water, instead of the painted canvas in front ofwhich it belongs. The heart of the community is right. Its heroine is MaryPickford. It rises to realism as one man. The little dog who cannot pose, and who pants and wags his tail on the screen as he would anywhere else, elicits thunderous applause. The baby who puckers up its face and cries, oblivious of its environment, is always a favorite. But the trend of allthis, these institutions cannot see. We librarians are seeing it a littlemore clearly. We may see it--we shall see it, more clearly still. 

The self-education of a community often depends very closely on bonds ofconnection already established between the minds of that community'sindividual members. Sometimes it depends on a sudden connection madethrough the agency of a single event of overwhelming importance andinterest. Let me illustrate what I mean by connection of this kind. Formany years it was my duty to cross the Hudson river twice daily on acrowded ferry-boat, and it used to interest me to watch the behavior ofthe crowds under the influence of simple impulses affecting them allalike. I am happy to say that I never had an opportunity of observing theeffect of complex impulses such as those of panic terror. I usedparticularly to watch, from the vantage point of a stairway whence I couldlook over their heads, the behavior of the crowd standing in the cabinjust before the boat made its landing. Each person in the crowd stoodstill quietly, and the tendency was toward a loose formation to ensurecomfort and some freedom of movement. At the same time each was ready andanxious to move forward as soon as the landing should be made. Only thosein front could see the bow of the ferryboat; the others could see nothingbut the persons directly in front of them. When those in the front ranksaw that the landing was very near they began to move forward; those justbehind followed suit and so on to the rear. The result was that I saw awave of compression, of the same sort as a sound-wave in air, move throughthe throng. The individual motions were forward but the wave movedbackward. No better example of a wave of this kind could be devised. Nowthe actions and reactions between the air-particles in a sound wave arepurely mechanical. Not so here. There was neither pushing nor pulling ofthe ordinary kind. Each person moved forward because his mind was fixed onmoving forward at the earliest opportunity, and because the forwardmovement of those just in front showed him that now was the time and theopportunity. The physical link, if there was one, properly speaking, between one movement and another was something like this: A wave of light, reflected from the body of the man in front, entered the eye of the manjust behind, where it was transformed into a nerve impulse that readiedthe brain through the optic nerve. Here it underwent complicatedtransformations and reactions whose nature we can but surmise, until itleft the brain as a motor impulse and caused the leg muscles to contract, moving their owner forward. All this may or may not have taken placewithin the sphere of consciousness; in the most cases it had happened sooften that it had been relegated to that of unconscious cerebration. 

I have entered into so much detail because I want to make it clear that aconnection may be established between members of a group, even so casual agroup as that of persons who happen to cross on the same ferry boat, thatis so real and compelling, that its results simulate those of physicalforces. In thin case the results were dependent on the existence in thecrowd of one common bond of interest. They all wanted to leave the ferryboat as soon as possible, and by its bow. If some of them had wanted tostay on the boat and go back with it, or if it had been a river steamboatwhere landings were made from several gangways in different parts of theboat the simple wave of compression that I saw would not have been set up. In like manner the ordinary influences that act on men's minds tend in allsorts of directions and their results are not easily traced. Occasionally, however, there occurs some event so great that it turns us all in the samedirection and establishes a common network of psychical connections. Suchan event fosters community education. 

We have lately witnessed such a phenomenon in the sudden outbreak of thegreat European War. Probably no person in the community as we librariansknow it remained unaffected by this event. In most it aroused some kind ofa desire to know what was going on. It was necessary that most of usshould know a little more than we did of the differences in racialtemperament and aim among the inhabitants of the warring nations, of suchmovements as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism, of the recent politicalhistory of Europe, of modern military tactics and strategy, ofinternational law, of geography, of the pronunciation of foreignplacenames, of the chemistry of explosives--of a thousand things regardingwhich we had hitherto lacked the impulse to inform ourselves. This sort ofthing is going on in a community every day, but here was a catastrophesetting in motion a mighty brain-wave that had twisted us all in onedirection. Notice now what a conspicuous role our public libraries play inphenomena of this kind. In the first place, the news-paper and periodicalpress reflects at once the interest that has been aroused. Where man'sunaided curiosity would suggest one question it adds a hundred others. Problems that would otherwise seem simple enough now appear complex--thewhole mental interest is intensified. At the same time there is an attemptto satisfy the questions thus raised. The man who did not know about theBelgian treaty, or the possible use of submarines as commerce-destroyers, has all the issues put before him with at least an attempt to settle them. This service of the press to community education would be attempted, butit would not be successfully rendered, without the aid of the publiclibrary, for it has come to pass that the library is now almost the onlynon-partisan institution that we possess; and community education, to beeffective, must be non-partisan. The press is almost necessarily biassed. The man who is prejudiced prefers the paper or the magazine that willcater to his prejudices, inflame them, cause him to think that they arereasoned results instead of prejudices. If he keeps away from the publiclibrary he may succeed in blinding himself; if he uses it he can hardly doso. He will find there not only his own side but all the others; if he hasthe ordinary curiosity that is our mortal heritage he cannot help glancingat the opinions of others occasionally. No man is really educated who doesnot at least know that another side exists to the question on which he hasalready made up his mind--or had it made up for him. 

Further, no one is content to stop with the ordinary periodicalliterature. The flood of books inspired by this war is one of the mostastonishing things about it. Most libraries are struggling to keep up withit in some degree. Very few of these books would be within the reach ofmost of us were it not for the library. 

I beg you to notice the difference in the reaction of the library to thiswar and that of the public school as indicative of the difference betweenformal educative processes, as we carry them on, and the self-education ofthe community. I have emphasized the freedom of the library from bias. Theschool is necessarily biassed--perhaps properly so. You remember the storyof the candidate for a district school who, when asked by an examiningcommittee-man whether the earth was round or flat, replied, "Well, somesays one and some t'other. I teach either round or flat, as the parentswish. "

Now, there are books that maintain the flatness of the earth, and theyproperly find a place on the shelves of large public libraries. Those whowish to compare the arguments pro and con are at liberty to do so. Even insuch a _res adjudicata_ as this the library takes no sides. But in spiteof the obliging school candidate, the school cannot proceed in this way. The teaching of the child must be definite. And there are other subjects, historical ones for instance, in which the school's attitude may bedetermined by its location, its environment, its management. When it is apublic school and its controlling authority is really trying to giveimpartial instruction there are some subjects that must simply be skipped, leaving them to be covered by post-scholastic community education. This isthe school's limitation. Only the policy of caution is very apt to becarried too far. Thus we find that in the school the immense educationaldrive of the European War has not been utilized as it has in the communityat large. In some places the school authorities have erected a barrieragainst it. So far as they are concerned the war has been non-existent. This difference between the library and the school appears in such reportsas the following from a branch librarian:

"Throughout the autumn and most of the winter we found it absolutelyimpossible to supply the demand for books about the war. Everything we hadon the subject or akin to it--books, magazines, pamphlets--were inconstant use. Books of travel and history about the warring countriesbecame popular--things that for years had been used but rarely becamesuddenly vitally interesting. 

"I have been greatly interested by the fact that the high school boys andgirls never ask for anything about the war. Not once during the winterhave I seen in one of them a spark of interest in the subject. It seems sostrange that it should be necessary to keep them officially ignorant ofthis great war because the grandfather of one spoke French and of anotherGerman. "

Another librarian says:

"The war again has naturally stimulated an interest in maps. With everyturn in military affairs, new ones are issued and added to our collection. These maps, as received, have been exhibited for short periods uponscreens and they have never lacked an appreciative line of spectators, representing all nationalities. "

One noticeable effect of the war in libraries has been to stimulate themarking of books, periodicals and newspapers by readers, especially inperiodical rooms. Readers with strong feelings cannot resist annotatingarticles or chapters that express opinions in which they cannot concur. Pictures of generals or royalties are especially liable to defacement withopprobrious epithets. This feeling extends even to bulletins. Librariesreceive strenuous protests against the display of portraits and othermaterial relating to one of the contesting parties without similarmaterial on the other side to offset it. 

"Efforts to be strictly neutral have not always met with success, somereaders apparently regarding neutrality as synonymous with suppression ofeverything favorable to the opposite side. One library reports that thedisplay of an English military portrait called forth an energetic protestbecause it was not balanced by a German one. "

Such manifestations as these are merely symptoms. The impulse of the wartoward community education is a tremendous one and it is not strange thatit should find an outlet in all sorts of odd ways. The German sympathizerwho would not ordinarily think of objecting to the display of an Englishportrait, and in fact would probably not think of examining it closelyenough to know whether it was English or Austrian, has now become alert. His alertness makes him open to educative influences, but it may also showitself in such ways as that just noted. 

Keeping the war out of the schools is of course a purely local phenomenon, to be deprecated where it occurs. The library can do its part here also. 

"G. Stanley Hall believes that the problem of teaching the war is how toutilize in the very best way the wonderful opportunity to open, see andfeel the innumerable and vital lessons involved. " Commenting on this achildren's librarian says: "The unparalleled opportunity offered to ourcountry, and the new complex problems presented by these new conditionsshould make the children's librarian pause and take heed. 

"Can we do our part toward using the boy's loyalty to his gang or hisnine, his love of his country, his respect for our flag, his devotion toour heroes, in developing a sense of human brotherhood which alone canprevent or delay in the next generation another such catastrophe as theone we face to-day?"

Exclusion of the war from the schools is partly the outcome of the generalattitude of most of our schoolmen, who object to the teaching of a subjectas an incidental. Arithmetic must be studied for itself alone. To absorbit as a by-product of shop-work, as is done in Gary, is inadmissible. Butit is also a result of the fear that teaching the war at all wouldnecessarily mean a partisan teaching of it--a conclusion which perhaps wecannot condemn when we remember the partisan instruction in various othersubjects for which our schools are responsible. 

Again, this exclusion is doubtless aided by the efforts of some pacifists, who believe that, ostrich-like, we should hide our heads in the sand, toavoid acknowledging the existence of something we do not like. "Why war?"asks a recent pamphlet. Why, indeed? But we may ask in turn "Why fire?""Why flood?" I cannot answer these questions, but it would be foolish toact as if the scourges did not exist. Nay, I hasten to insure myselfagainst them, though the possibility that they will injure me is remote. This ultra-pacifist attitude has gone further than school education and istrying to put the lid on community education also. Objection, forinstance, has been made to an exhibit of books, prints and posters aboutthe war, which was displayed in the St. Louis Public Library for nearlytwo months. We intended to let it stand for about a week, but the publicwould not allow this. The community insists on self-education even againstthe will of its natural allies. The contention that we are cultivating theinnate blood-thirstiness of our public, I regard as absurd. 

What can we do toward generating or taking advantage of other greatdriving impulses toward community education? Must we wait for the horrorsof a great war to teach us geography, industrial chemistry andinternational law? Is it necessary to burn down a house every time we wantto roast a pig? Certainly not. But just as one would not think of bringingon any kind of a catastrophe in order to utilize its shock for educationalpurposes, so also I doubt very much whether we need concern ourselvesabout the initiation of any impulse toward popular education. Theseimpulses exist everywhere in great number and variety and we need only toselect the right one and reinforce it. Attempts to generate others arerarely effective. When we hear the rich mellow tone of a great organ pipe, it is difficult to realize that all the pipe does is to reinforce aselected tone among thousands of indistinguishable noises made by the airrushing through a slit and striking against an edge. Yet this is the fact. These incipient impulses permeate the community all about us; all we haveto do is to select one, feed it and give it play and we shall have an"educational movement. " This fact is strongly impressed upon anyoneworking with clubs. If it is desired to foster some movement by means ofan organization, it is rarely necessary to form one for the purpose. Everycommunity teems with clubs, associations and circles. All that is neededis to capture the right one and back it up. Politicians well understandthis art of capture and use it often for evil purposes. In the librarian'shands it becomes an instrument for good. Better than to offer a course oftwenty lectures under the auspices of the library is it to capture a club, give it house-room, and help it with its program. I am proud of the factthat in fifteen public rooms in our library, about four thousand meetingsare held in the course of the year; but I am inclined to be still prouderof the fact that not one of these is held formally under the auspices ofthe library or is visibly patronized by it. To go back to our thesis, alleducation is self-education; we can only select, guide and strengthen, butwhen we have done these things adequately, we have done a very great workindeed. 

What is true of assemblies and clubs is also true of the selection and useof books. A book purchased in response to a demand is worth a dozen boughtbecause the librarian thinks the library ought to have them. Thepossibilities of free suggestion by the community are, it seems to me, farfrom realized, yet even as it is, I believe that librarians have anunexampled opportunity of feeling out promising tendencies in this greatflutter of educational impulses all about us, and so of selecting theright ones and helping them on. 

Almost while I have been writing this I have been visited by a delegatefrom the foundrymen's club--an organization that wants more books onfoundry practice and wants them placed together in a convenient spot. Sucha visit is of course a heaven-sent opportunity and I suppose I betrayedsomething of my pleasure in my manner. My visitor said, "I am so glad youfeel this way about it; we have been meaning for some time to call on you, but we were in doubt about how we should be received. " Such moments arehumiliating to the librarian. Great heavens! Have we advertised, discussed, talked and plastered our towns with publicity, only to learn atlast that the spokesman of a body of respectable men, asking legitimateservice, rather expects to be kicked downstairs than otherwise when heapproaches us? Is our publicity failing in quantity or in quality?

Whatever may be the matter, it is in response to demands like this thatthe library must play its part in community education. Here as elsewhereit is the foundrymen who are the important factors--their attitude, theirdesires, their capabilities. Our function is that of the organ pipe--topick out the impulse, respond to it and give it volume and carrying power. The community will educate itself whether we help or not. It is permeatedby lines of intelligence as the magnetic field is by lines of force. Thrust in a bit of soft iron and the force-lines will change theirdirection in order to pass through the iron. Thrust a book into thecommunity field, and its lines of intelligence will change direction inorder to take in the contents of the book. If we could map out the fieldwe should see great masses of lines sweeping through our public libraries. 

All about us we see men who tell us that they despair of democracy; thatat any rate, whatever its advantages, democracy can never be "efficient. "Efficient for what? Efficiency is a relative quality, not absolute. A bigGerman howitzer would be about as inefficient a tool as could be imagined, for serving an apple-pie. Beside, democracy is a goal; we have not reachedit yet; we shall never reach it if we decide that it is undesirable. Thepath toward it is the path of Nature, which leads through conflicts, survivals, and modifications. Part of it is the path of communityeducation, which I believe to be efficient in that it is leading on towarda definite goal. Part of Nature is man, with his desires, hopes andabilities. Some men, and many women, are librarians, in whom these desiresand hopes have definite aims and in whom the corresponding abilities aremore or less developed. We are all thus cogs in Nature's great scheme forcommunity education; let us be intelligent cogs, and help the movement oninstead of hindering it. 

CLUBWOMEN'S READING

I--_The Malady_

A well-dressed woman entered the Art Department of a large public library. "Have you any material on the Medici?" she asked the custodian. "Yes; justwhat kind of material do you want?" "Stop a minute, " cried the woman, extending a detaining hand; "before you get me anything, just tell me whatthey are!" Librarians are trained not to laugh. No one could have detectedthe ghost of a smile on this one's face as she lifted the "M" volume of acyclopedia from a shelf and placed it on the table before the seeker afterknowledge. "There; that will tell you, " she said, and returned to herwork. 

Not long afterward she was summoned by a beckoning finger. "I can't tellfrom this book, " said the perplexed student, "whether the Medici were afamily or a race of people. " The Art Librarian tried to untie this knot, but it was not long before another presented itself. "This book doesn'texplain, " said the troubled investigator, "whether the Medici wereFlorentines or Italians. " Still without a quiver, the art assistantemitted the required drop of information. "Shan't I get you something morenow?" she asked. "Oh, no; this will be quite sufficient, " and taking outpencil and paper the inquirer began to write rapidly with the cyclopediapropped before her. Presently, when the Art Librarian looked up, her guesthad disappeared. But she was on hand the next morning. "May I see thatbook again?" she asked sweetly. "There are some words here in my copy thatI can't quite make out. "

On another occasion a reader, of the same sex, wandered into thereading-room and began to gaze about her with that peculiar sort ofperplexed aimlessness that librarians have come to recognise instinctivelyas an index to the wearer's state of mind. "Have you anything on Americantravels?" she asked. 

"Do you mean travels in America, or travels by Americans in foreigncountries?"

"Well; I don't know--exactly. "

"Do you want books like Dickens's _American Notes_, that give aforeigner's impression of this country?"

"Ye-es--possibly. "

"Or books like Hawthorne's _Note Book_, telling how a foreign countryappears to an American?"

"We-ell; perhaps. "

"Are you following a programme of reading?"

"Yes. "

"May I see it? That may give me a clue. "

"I haven't a copy here. "

"Can you give me the name of the person or committee who made it?"

"Oh, I _made_ it _myself_. "

This was a "facer"; the librarian seemed to have brought up against astone wall, but she waited, knowing that a situation, unlike a knot, willsometimes untie itself. 

The seeker after knowledge also waited for a time. Then she broke outanimatedly:

"Why, I just wanted American travels, don't you know? Funny little storiesand things about the sort of Americans that go abroad with a bird-cage!"

Just what books were given to her I do not know; but in due time herinteresting paper before the Olla Podrida Club was properly noticed in thelocal papers. 

In another case a perplexed club-woman came to a library for aid in makinga programme of reading. "Have you some ideas about the subject you want totake up?" asked the reference assistant. 

"Well, we had thought of England, or perhaps Scotland; and some of uswould like the Elizabethan Period. "

The assistant, after some faithful work, produced a list of books andarticles on each of these somewhat comprehensive subjects and sent them tothe reader for selection. "Which did you finally take?" she asked when theinquirer next visited the library. 

"Oh, they were so good, we decided to use all of them this year!"

The writer is no pessimist. These stories which are as true, word forword, as any tales not taken down by a stenographer (and far more so thansome that are) seemed to throw the persons who told them into a sort ofdumb despair, but I hastened to reassure them. I pointed out that theinquirers after knowledge had, beyond all doubt, obtained some modicum ofwhat they wanted. If the lady in the first tale, for instance, hadmistakenly supposed that the Medici were a new kind of dance or somethingto eat, she surely has been disabused. And her cyclopedia article wasprobably as well written as most of its kind, so that a literal transcriptof it could have done no harm either to the copyist or to her clubmates. And the paper on "American Travels, " and the combined lists on England, Scotland and the Elizabethan Period; did not those who laboured on them, or with them, acquire information in the process? Most assuredly!

Still, I must confess that, in advancing these arguments, I feel somewhatlike an _advocatus diaboli_. It is all very well to treat the puzzledclubwoman as a joke. When a man slips on a banana-peel and goes down, wemay laugh at his plight; but suppose the whole crowd of passers-by beganto pitch and slide and tumble! Should we not think that some horribleepidemic had laid its hand on us? The ladies with their Medici and theirTravels are not isolated instances. Ask the librarians; they know, but incountless instances they do not tell, for fear of casting ridicule uponthe hundreds of intelligent clubwomen whom they are proud to help. In manylibraries there is a standing rule against repeating or discussing theerrors and slips of the public, especially to the ever hungry reporter. Ibreak this rule here with equanimity, and even with a certain degree ofhope, for my object is to awaken my readers to the knowledge that part ofthe reading public is suffering from a malady of some kind. Later I maytry my hand at diagnosis and even at therapeutics. And I am taking as anillustration chiefly the reading done by women's clubs, not because men donot do reading of the same kind, or because it is not done by individualsas well as by groups; but because, just at the present time, women ingeneral, and clubwomen in particular, seem especially likely to beattacked by the disease. It must be remembered also that I am writing fromthe standpoint of the public library, and I here make humbleacknowledgement of the fact that many things in the educational field, both good and bad, go on quite outside of that institution and beyond itsken. 

The intellectual bonds between the library and the woman's club havealways been close. Many libraries are the children of such clubs; manyclubs have been formed in and by libraries. If any mistakes are being madein the general policies and programmes of club reading, the librarianwould naturally be the first to know it, and he ought to speak out. Hedoes know it, and his knowledge should become public property at once. But, I repeat, although the trouble is conspicuous in connection with thereading of women's clubs, it is far more general and deeply rooted thanthis. 

The malady's chief symptom, which is well known to all librarians, is alack of correspondence between certain readers and the books that theychoose. Reading, like conversation, is the meeting of two minds. If thereis no contact, the process fails. If the cogs on the gearwheels do notinteract, the machine can not work. If the reader of a book on algebradoes not understand arithmetic; if he tackles a philosophical essay on therepresentative function without knowing what the phrase means; if he triesto read a French book without knowing the language, his mind is not fittedfor contact with that of the writer, and the mental machinery will notmove. 

In the early days of the Open Shelf, before librarians had realised thenecessity of copious assignments to "floor duty, " and before there werechildren's librarians, I saw in a branch library a small child staggeringunder the weight of a volume of Schaff's _History of the ChristianChurch_, which he had taken from the shelves and was presenting at thedesk to be charged. "You are not going to read that, are you?" said thedesk assistant. 

"It isn't for me; it's for me big brudder. "

"What did your big brother ask you to get?"

"Oh, a Physiology!"

Nowadays, our well-organised children's rooms make such an occurrencedoubtful with the little ones, but apparently there is much of it withadults. 

Too much of our reading--I should rather say our attempts at reading--isof this character. Such attempts are the result of a tendency to regardthe printed page as a fetich--to think that if one knows his alphabet andcan call the printed words one after another as his eye runs along theline, some unexplained good will result, or at least that he has performeda praiseworthy act, has "accumulated merit" somehow or somewhere, like aThibetan with his prayer-wheel. 

It is probably a fact that if a man should meet you in the street and say, "In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility, " you would stare athim and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereasif you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them toascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your ownmeaning into them. The words I have strung together happen to have nomeaning, but the result would be the same if they meant something that washidden from the reader by his inability to understand them, no matter whatthe cause of that inability might be. 

This malady is doubtless spontaneous in some degree, and dependent onfailings of the human mind that we need not discuss here, but there aresigns that it is being fostered, spread, and made more acute by specialinfluences. Probably our educational methods are not altogether blameless. The boy who trustfully approached a Reference Librarian and said, "I haveto write a composition on what I saw between home and school; have you gota book about that?" had doubtless been taught that he must look in a bookfor everything. The conscientious teacher who was now trying to separatehim from his notion may have been the very one who, perhaps unconsciously, had instilled it; if so, her fault had thus returned to plague her. 

The boy or girl who comes to attach a sacredness or a wizardry to the bookin itself will naturally believe, after a little, that whether heunderstands what is in it matters little--and this is the malady of whichwe have been complaining. 

A college teacher of the differential calculus, in a time now happily longpast, when a pupil timidly inquired the reason for this or that, was wontto fix the interrogator with his eye and say, "Sir; it is so because thebook says so!" Even in more recent days a well-known university teacher, accustomed to use his own text-book, used to say when a student hadventured to vary its classic phraseology, "It can not be expressed betterthan in the words of the book!?" These instances, of course, are takenfrom the dark ages of education, but even to-day I believe that a falseidea of the value of a printed page merely as print--not as the record ofa mind, ready to make contact with the mind of a reader--has impresseditself too deeply on the brains of many children at an age when suchimpressions are apt to be durable. Not that the schools are especially atfault; we have all played our part in this unfortunate business. It mightall fade, at length; we all know that many good teachings of our childhooddo vanish; why should not the bad ones occasionally follow suit?

But now come in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult--theChautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, thecorrespondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists, the devisers of "courses. " They deepen the fleeting impression andincrease its capacity for harm, while varying slightly the mechanism thatproduced it. As the child grows into a man, his childish idea that a bookwill produce a certain effect independently of what it contains is apt toyield a little to reason. The new influences, some of which I have namedabove, do not attempt directly to combat this dawning intelligence; theyutilise it to complete the mental discomfiture of their victims. Theyadmit the necessity of comprehending the contents of the book, but theypersuade the reader that such comprehension is easier than it really is. And they often administer specially concocted tabloids that convince onethat he knows more than he really does. Thus the unsuspecting adult goeson reading what he does not understand, not now thinking that it does notmatter, but falsely persuaded that he has become competent to understand. 

Every one of the agencies that I have named aims to do good educationalwork; every one is competent to do such work; nearly every one does muchof it. I am finding fault with them only so far as they succeed inpersuading readers that they are better educated than they really are. Inthis respect such agencies are precisely on a par with the proprietarymedicine that is an excellent laxative or sudorific, but is offered alsoas a cure for tuberculosis or cancer. 

I once heard the honoured head of a famous body that does an enormousamount of work of this sort deliver an _apologia_, deserving of allattention, in which he complained that his institution had been falselyaccused of superficiality. It was, he said, perfectly honest in what ittaught. If its pupils thought that the elementary knowledge they weregaining was comprehensive and thorough, that was their fault--not his. Andvet, at that moment, the institution was posing before its pupils as a"university" and using the forms and nomenclature of such a body tostrengthen the idea in their minds. We cannot acquit it, or any of theagencies like it, of complicity in the causation of the malady whosesymptoms we are discussing. 

It is not the fault of the women's clubs that they have fallen into linein such an imposing procession as this. Their formation and workconstitute one of the most interesting and important manifestations of thepresent feminist movement. Their rôle in it is partly social, partlyeducational; and as they consist of adults, elementary education is ofcourse excluded from their programme. We therefore find them committed, perhaps unconsciously, to the plan of required or recommended reading, ina form that has long been the bane of our educational systems both inschool and out. 

One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisitionof information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be therelationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may bemade in the future. According to this idea, if a woman can once get intoher head that the Medici were a family and not "a race of people, " itmatters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are worthreading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she hasever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future. 

That the members of these clubs are willing to pursue knowledge underthese hampering conditions is of course a point in their favour, so far asit goes. A desire for knowledge is never to be despised, even when it isnot entertained for its own sake. And a secondary desire may often bechanged into a primary one, if the task is approached in the right way. The possibility of such a transformation is a hopeful feature of thepresent situation. 

The reading that is done by women in connection with club work is ofseveral different types. In the simplest organisations, which are readingclubs pure and simple, a group of books, roughly equal in number to themembership, is taken and passed around until each person has read themall. There is no connection between them, and each volume is selectedsimply on some one's statement that it is a "good book. " A step higher isthe club where the books are on one general subject, selected by some onewho has been asked to prescribe a "course of reading. " By easy gradationswe arrive at the final stage, where the reading is of the nature ofinvestigation and its outcome is an essay. A subject is decided on at thebeginning of the season. The programme committee selects several phases ofit and assigns each to a member, who prepares her essay and reads it tothe club at one of the stated meetings. In this case the reading to bedone in preparation for writing the essay may or may not be guided by thecommittee. In many cases, where the local public library cooperatesactively with the clubs, a list may be made out by the librarian andperhaps printed, with due acknowledgment, in the club's year book. No onecan doubt, in looking over typical programmes and lists among thethousands that represent the annual reading of the women's clubsthroughout the United States, that a serious and sustained effort is beingmade to introduce the intellect, as an active factor, into the lives ofthousands of women--lives where hitherto it has played little part, whether they are millionaires or near paupers, workers or idlers. Withthis aim there must be frill measure of sympathy, but I fear we cancommend it only in the back-handed fashion in which a great authority onsociology recently commended the Socialists. "If sympathy with what theyare trying to do, as opposed to the way in which they are trying to do it, makes one a Socialist, " said the Professor, "then I am a Socialist. " Herealso we may sympathise with the aim, but the results are largely dependenton the method; and that method is the offspring of ignorance andinefficiency. The results may be summed up in one word--superficiality. Ihave elsewhere warned readers not to think that this word means simply aslight knowledge of, a subject. A slight knowledge is all that most of uspossess, or need to possess, about most subjects. I know a little aboutMontenegro for instance--something of its origin and relationships, itstopography, the names and characteristics of a city or two, the racial andother peculiarities of its inhabitants. Yet I should cut a poor figureindeed in an examination on Montenegrin history, geography or government. Is my knowledge "superficial"? It could not properly be so stigmatisedunless I should pose as an authority on Montenegro, or unless myopportunities to know about the country had been so great that failure totake advantage of them should argue mental incapacity. The trouble withthe reading-lists and programmes of our women's clubs, inherited in somedegree from our general educational methods, is that they emphasise theirown content and ignore what they do not contain, to such an extent thatthose who use them remain largely in ignorance of the fact that the formerbears a very small proportion indeed to the latter. 

It was once my duty to act as private tutor in algebra and geometry to ayoung man preparing for college. He was bright and industrious, but Ifound that he was under the impression that when he had gone to the end ofhis text-books in those two subjects he would have mastered, not only allthe algebra and geometry, but all the mathematics, that the world held instore. And when this story has been told in despair to some veryintelligent persons they have commented: "Well, there isn't much more, isthere?"

The effort of the text-book writer, as well as that of the maker ofprogrammes, lists, and courses, appears to have been to produce what hecalls a "well-rounded" effect; in other words, to make the student thinkthat the whole subject--in condensed form perhaps, but still thewhole--lies within what he has turned out. Did you ever see a chemistrythat gave, or tried to give, an idea of the world of chemical knowledgethat environs its board cover? One has to become a Newton before he feels, with that sage, like a child, playing on the sands, with the great, unexplored ocean of knowledge stretching out before him. Most students arerather like ducks in a barn-yard puddle, quite sure that they are familiarwith the whole world and serene in that knowledge. 

Most writers of text-books would indignantly deny that this criticismimplies a fault. It is none of their business, they would say, to callattention to what is beyond their scope. So be it. Unfortunately, everyone feels in the same way and so the horizon of our women's clubs is thatof the puddle instead of the ocean. 

It is a most interesting fact in this connection that there exist certainorganisations which make a business of furnishing clubwomen withinformation for their papers. I have heard this service described as a"godsend, " to clubs in small places where there are no libraries, or wherethe libraries are poorly equipped with books and _personnel_. But, if I amcorrectly informed, the service does not stop with the supply of rawmaterial; it goes on to the finished product, and the perplexed lady whois required to read a paper on "Melchisedek" or on "Popular ErrorsRegarding the Theory of Groups, " may for an adequate fee, or possibly evenfor an inadequate one, obtain a neatly typewritten manuscript on thesubject, ready to read. 

This sort of thing is not at all to be wondered at. It has gone on sincethe dawn of time with college theses, clergymen's sermons, the orationsand official papers of statesmen. Whenever a man is confronted with anintellectual task that he dare not shirk, and yet has not the intellect orthe interest to perform, the first thing he thinks of is to hire some oneto do it for him, and this demand has always been great enough andwidespread enough to make it profitable for some one to organise thesupply on a commercial basis. What interests us in the present case is thefact that its existence in the woman's club affords an instant clue to thestate of mind of many of its members. They have this in common with theplagiarising pupil, clergyman, or statesman--they are called upon to dosomething in which they have only a secondary interest. The minister whoreads a sermon on the text "Thou Shalt Not Steal, " and considers that thefact that he has paid five dollars for it will absolve him from the chargeof inconsistency, does not--cannot--feel any desire to impress hiscongregation with a desire for right living--he wants only to hold hisjob. The university student who, after ascertaining that there is nocopyable literature in the Library on "Why I Came to College, " pays aclassmate a dollar to give this information to the Faculty, cares nothingabout the question; but he does care to avoid discipline. So the clubwomanwho reads a purchased essay on "Ireland in the Fourteenth Century, " hasnot the slightest interest in the subject; but she does want to remain amember of her club, in good and regular standing. It is the samesubstitution of adventitious for natural motives and stimuli that worksintellectual havoc from the mother's knee up to the Halls of Congress. 

When I assert boldly that at the present time the majority of vague andillogical readers are women, and that women's clubs are responsible formuch of that kind of reading, I shall doubtless incur the displeasure ofthe school of feminists who seem bent on minimising the differencesbetween the two sexes. Obvious physical differences they have not beenable to explain away, and to deny that corresponding mental differencesexist is to shut one's eyes to all the teachings of modern physiology. Themental life is a function, not of the brain alone, but of the wholenervous system of which the brain is but the principal ganglion. Cut off aman's legs, and you have removed something from his mental, as well asfrom his physical equipment. That men and women should have minds of thesame type is a physiological impossibility. A familiar way of stating thedifference is to say that in the man's mind reason predominates, in thewoman's, intuition. There is doubtless something to be said for thisstatement of the distinction, but it is objectionable because it isgenerally interpreted to mean--quite unnecessarily--that a woman's mind isinferior to a man's--a distinction about as foolish as it would be to saythe negative electricity is inferior to positive, or cold to heat. Thetypes are in most ways supplementary, and a combination of the two hasalways been a potent intellectual force--one of the strongest argumentsfor marriage as an institution. When we try to do the work of the worldwith either type alone we have generally made a mess of it. And theoutcome seems to make it probable that the female type is especially proneto become the prey of fallacies like that which has brought about thepresent flood of useless, or worse than useless, reading. 

I shall doubtless be asked whether I assert that one type of mind belongsalways to the man and one to the woman. By no means. I do not even layemphasis on the necessity of naming the two types "male" and "female. " AllI say is that the types exist--with those intermediate cases that alwaysbother the classifier--and that the great majority of men possess one typeand the great majority of women the other. It is possible that differencesof training may have originated or at least emphasised the types; it ispossible that future training may obliterate the lines that separate them, but I do not believe it. I am even afraid of trying the experiment, forthere is reason to believe that its success in the mental field mightreact unfavourably on those physical differences on which the future ofthe race depends. We may have gone too far in this direction already; elsewhy the feverish anxiety of the girls' colleges to prove that theirgraduates are marrying and bearing children?

The fact is that the problem of the education of the sexes is not yetsolved. Educating one sex alone didn't work; neither, I believe, does thepresent plan of educating both alike, whether in the same institution, orseparately. 

II--_A Diagnosis_

Reading, like conversation, is, or ought to be, a contact between twominds. The difference is that while one may talk only with hiscontemporaries and neighbours one may read the words of a writer fardistant both in time and space. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the printedword has become a fetish, but fetishes of any kind are not in accordancewith the spirit of the age, and their veneration should be discouraged. Reading in which the contact of minds is of secondary importance, or evencuts no figure at all, is meaningless and valueless. 

In a previous paper, reasons have been given for believing that reading ofthis kind is peculiarly prevalent among the members of women's clubs. Thevalue of these organisations is so great, and the services that they haverendered to women, and through them to the general cause of socialbetterment, are so evident, that it seems well worth while to examine thematter a little more closely, and to complete a diagnosis based on thestudy of the symptoms that have already presented themselves. As most ofthe reading done in connection with clubs is in preparation for thewriting and reading of papers, we may profitably, perhaps, direct ourattention to this phase of the subject. 

Most persons will agree, probably, that the average club paper is notnotably worth while. It is written by a person not primarily and vitallyinterested in the subject, and it is read to an assemblage most of whomare similarly devoid of interest--the whole proceeding being more or lessperfunctory. Could it be expected that reading done in connection withsuch a performance should be valuable?

This is worth pondering, because it is a fact that almost all the vitalinformative literature that is produced at first hand sees the light inconnection with clubs and associations--bodies that publish journals, "transactions" or "proceedings" for the especial purpose of printing theproductions of their members. 

This literature, for the most part, does not come to the notice of thegeneral reader. The ordinary books on the technical subjects of which ittreats are not raw material, but a manufactured product--compilations fromthe original sources. And the pity of it is that very many of them, oftenthe best of them from a purely literary point of view, are sounsatisfactory, viewed from the point of view of accomplishment. They donot do what they set out to do; they are full of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, interpolations and omissions. It is the old story;those who know won't tell and the task is assumed by those who areeminently able to tell, but don't know. The scientific expert despises thepublic, which is forced to get its information through glib but ignorantexpounders. This is a digression, but it may serve to illuminate thesituation, which is that the authoritative literature of special subjectssees the light almost wholly in the form of papers, read before clubs andassociations. Evidently there is nothing in the mere fact that a paper isto be read before a club, to make it trivial or valueless. Yet how muchthat is of value to the world first saw the light in a paper read before awoman's club? How much original thought, how much discovery, how muchinvention, how much inspiration, is put into their writing and emanatesfrom their reading?

There must be a fundamental difference of some kind between theconstitution and the methods of these two kinds of clubs. A study of thisdifference will throw light on the kind of reading that must be done inconnection with each and may explain, in great part, why the reading donefor women's club-papers is what it is. 

A scientific or technical society exists largely for the purpose ofinforming its members of the original work that is being done by each ofthem. When anyone has accomplished such work or has made such progressthat he thinks an account of what he has done would be interesting, hesends a description of it to the proper committee, which decides whetherit shall be read and discussed at a meeting, or published in theProceedings, or both, or neither. The result depends on the size of themembership, on its activity, and on the value of its work. It may be thatthe programme committee has an embarrassment of riches from which toselect, or that there is poverty instead. But in no case does it arrange aprogramme. The Physical Society, if that is its name and subject, does notdecide that it will devote the meetings of the current season to aconsideration of Radio-activity and assign to specified members thereading of papers on Radio-active springs, the character of RadiumEmanation, and so on. If it did, it would doubtless get precisely the sameresults that we are complaining of in the case of the Woman's Club. A manwhose specialty is thermodynamics might be told off to prepare a paper onRadio-active Elements in Rocks--a subject in which he is not interested. He could have nothing new nor original to say on the subject and his paperwould be a mere compilation. It would not even be a good compilation, forhis interest and his skill would lie wholly in another direction. The goodresults that the society does get are wholly dependent on the fact thateach writer is full of new information that he desires, above all things, to communicate to his fellow-members. 

In the preparation of such a paper, one needs, of course, to read, andoften to read widely. Much of the reading will be done in connection withthe work described, or even before it is begun. No one wishes to undertakean investigation that has already been made by someone else, and so thefirst thing that a competent investigator does is to survey his field andascertain what others have accomplished in it. This task is by no meanseasy, for such information is often hidden in journals and transactionsthat are difficult to reach, and the published indexes of such material, though wonderfully advanced on the road toward perfection in the pasttwenty years, have yet far to travel before they reach it, Not only thewriter's description of what he has done or ascertained, but the characterof the work itself; the direction it takes--the inferences that he drawsfrom it, will be controlled and coloured by what he reads of others' work. And even if he finds it easy to ascertain what has been done and to get atthe published accounts and discussions of it, the mass may be so greatthat he has laid out for him a course of reading that may last manymonths. 

But mark the spirit with which he attacks it! He is at work on somethingthat seems to him supremely worth while. He is labouring to find outtruth, to dissipate error, to help his fellow-men to know something or todo something. The impulse to read, and to read much and thoroughly, is sopowerful that it may even need judicious repression. The differencebetween this kind of reading and that done in the preparation of a paperto fill a place in a set programme hardly needs emphasis. 

The preparation of papers for professional and technical societies hasbeen dwelt upon at such length, because I see no reason why the impulse toreading that it furnishes cannot also be placed at the disposal of thewoman's club; and I shall have some suggestions toward this end in afuture article. 

Meanwhile, I shall doubtless be told that it is unfair to compare thewoman's club, with its didactic aim, and the scientific association oftrained and interested investigators. It is true that we have plenty ofclubs--some of men alone, some of both sexes--whose object is to listen tointeresting and instructive papers on a set subject, often forming part ofa pre-arranged programme. These, however, need our attention here only sofar as the papers are prepared by members of the club, and in this casethey are in precisely the same class as the woman's club. In many cases, however, the paper is merely the excuse for a social gathering, perhaps ata dinner or a luncheon. Of course if the paper or lecture is by an expertinvited to give it, the case falls altogether outside of the region thatwe are exploring. 

I am condemning here all clubs, formed for an avowed educational orcultural purpose, that adopt set programmes and assign the subjects totheir own members. I am deploring the kind of reading to which this leads, the kind of papers that are prepared in this way, and the kind of thoughtand action that are the inevitable outcome. 

It would seem that the women's clubs now form an immense majority of allorganisations of this kind and that there are reasons for warning womenthat they are specially prone to this kind of mistake. 

The diversity of interests of the average man, the wideness of hiscontacts--the whole tradition of his sex--tends to minimise the injurythat may be done to him, intellectually and spiritually, by anything ofthis kind. The very fact that he is the woman's inferior spiritually, andin many cases, in intellect, also--although probably not at themaximum--relieves him, in great part, of the odium attaching to the errorthat has been described. Women are becoming keenly alive to thedeficiencies of their sex-tradition; they are trying to broaden theirintellectual contacts--that is the great modern feminist movement. Some ofthose who are active in it are making two mistakes--they are ignoring thedifferences between the sexes and they are trying to substitute revolutionfor evolution. In this latter error they are in very good company--hardlyone of the great and the good has not made it, at some time and in someway. Revolution is always the outcome of a mistake. The mistake may beantecedent and irrevocable, and the revolution therefore necessary, butthis is rarely the case. The revolutionist runs a risk common to all whoare in a hurry--he may break the object of his attention instead of movingit. When he wants to hand you a dish he hits it with a ball-bat. Taking areasonable amount of time is better in the long run. 

That there is no royal road to knowledge has long been recognised. Thetrouble with most of us is that we have interpreted this to mean that theacquisition of knowledge must always be a distasteful process. On thecontrary, the vivid interest that is the surest guide to knowledge is alsothe surest smoother of the path. Given the interest that lures the studenton, and he will spend years in surmounting rocks and breaking throughthorny jungles, realising their difficulties perhaps, but rejoicing themore when those difficulties prove no obstacles. 

The fact that the first step toward accomplishment is to create aninterest has long been recognised, but attempts have been made too oftento do it by devious ways, unrelated to the matter in hand. Students havebeen made to study history or algebra by offering prizes to the diligentand by threatening the slothful with punishment. More indirect rewards andpunishments abound in all our incitements to effort and need not bementioned here. They may often be effective, but the further removed theyare from direct personal interest in the subject, the weaker and the lesspermanent is the result. You may offer a boy a dollar to learn certainfacts in English history, but those facts will not be fixed so well or solastingly in his mind as those connected with his last year's trip toCalifornia, which he remembers easily without offer of reward or threat ofpunishment. 

The interest in the facts gathered by reading in connection with theaverage club paper is merely the result of a desire to remain in goodstanding by fulfilling the duties of membership; and these duties may befulfilled with slight effort and no direct interest, as we have alreadyseen. 

If interest were present even at the inception of the programme, somethingwould be gained; but in too many cases it is not. The programme committeemust make some kind of a programme, but what it is to be they know littleand care less. 

Two women recently entered a branch library and asked the librarian, whowas busy charging books at the desk, what two American dramatists sheconsidered "foremost. " This was followed by the request, "Please tell methe two best plays of each of them. " A few minutes later the queristsreturned and asked the same question about English dramatists, and stilllater about German, Russian, Italian and Spanish writers of the drama. Each time they eagerly wrote down the information and then retired to thereading-room for a few minutes' consultation. 

Finally they propounded a question that was beyond the librarian'sknowledge, and then she asked why they wanted to know. 

"We are making out the programme for our next year's study course in theBlank Club, " was the answer. 

"But you mustn't take my opinion as final, " protested the scandalisedlibrarian. "You ought to read up everything you can find about dramatists. I may have left out the most important ones. "

"This will do nicely, " said the club-woman, as she folded her sheets ofpaper. And it did--whether nicely or not deponent saith not? but itcertainly constituted the club programme. 

On another occasion a clubwoman entered the library and said with an airof importance, "I want your material on Susanna H. Brown. "

The librarian had never heard of Susanna, but experience had taught hermodesty and also a certain degree of guile, so she merely said, "What doyou want to know about her, particularly?"

"Our club wishes to discuss her contributions to American literature. "

Now the Brown family has been active in letters, from Charles Brockdendown to Alice, but no one seems to know of Susanna H. The librariancontrived to put off the matter until she could make some investigationsof her own, but, all the resources of the central reference room provingunequal to the task, she timidly asked the clubwoman, at her next visit, to solve the problem. 

"Oh, we don't know who Susanna H. Brown was; that is why we came to youfor information!"

"But where did you find the name?"

"Well, I don't know exactly; but one of our members, in a conversationwith some one who knows a lot about literature--I forget just who itwas--was told that Susanna H. Brown had rendered noteworthy services toAmerican literature. We've got to find out, for her name is alreadyprinted on the programme!"

I don't know what was said of Miss, or Mrs. Brown at the meeting; but myopinion is that this particular item on the programme had to be omitted. 

Another lady entered a library abruptly and said "I want your books onChina. "

"Do you mean the country of that name? or are you looking up porcelain?"

First perplexity and then dismay spread over the lady's face. "Why, Idon't know, " she faltered. "The program just said China!"

A university professor was once asked by one of these program committeesfor a list of references on German folklore--a subject to which it haddecided that its club should devote the current season. The list, asfurnished, proved rather stiff, and the astonished professor receivedforthwith the following epistle (quoted from memory):

"DEAR PROFESSOR--

"Thank you so much for the folk-lore; but we have changed our minds andhave decided to study the Chicago Drainage Canal instead. "

This hap-hazard method of programme-making is not confined to club papers, as the following anecdote will show:

An officer of a woman's club entered a library and said that she thoughtit would be nice to vary the usual literary programme by the introductionof story-telling, and she asked for aid from the library staff. It was abusy season and as the librarian hesitated the clubwoman added hastilythat the whole programme need not occupy more than half an hour. "We wantthe very simplest things, told in a few words, so that it will really beno trouble at all. "

Pressed to be more specific, she went on: "Well--no story must take morethan three minutes, and we want Little Nell, Louis IX, Moses in theBulrushes, the Princes in the Tower, Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Holy Night and Louis XI. 

"You see that allowing three minutes apiece would bring them all withintwenty-four minutes--less than half an hour, just as I said. 

"And--oh, yes! we want the storyteller to sit on a platform, and just infront of her we will pose a group of little girls, all in white frocks. Won't that be nice?"

The making of programmes has in many cases been influenced by the factthat some subjects are considered more "high-toned" than others. The dramais at present a particularly high-toned subject. The fine arts are alwaysplaced in the first class. Apparently anything closely related to thepersonal lives, habits and interests of those concerned is under a ban. The fine arts, for instance, are not recognised as including the patternsof wall-paper or curtains, or the decoration of plates or cups. Copyingfrom one programme to another is a common expedient. The making of theseprogrammes betrays, all through its processes and their inevitable result, lack of originality, blind adherence to models, unquestioning imitation ofsomething that has gone before. I do not believe these to besex-characteristics, and there are signs that the sex is growing out ofthem. If they are not sex characteristics they must be the results ofeducation, for ordinary heredity would quickly equalise the sexes in thisrespect. I have already stated my belief that the physical differencesbetween the sexes are necessarily accompanied by mental differences, and Ithink it probable that the characteristics noted above, although notproper to sex, spring from the fact that we are expecting like resultsfrom the same educational treatment of unlike minds. When we have learnedhow to vary our treatment of these minds so as to produce like results--inthose cases where we want the results to be alike, as in the presentinstance--we shall have solved the problem of education, so far as itaffects sex-differences. 

It has long been recognised that whenever woman does show a deviation fromstandards she is apt to deviate far and erratically. So far, however, shehas shown no marked tendency so to deviate in the arts and a very slightone in the sciences. There have been lately some marked instances of herupward deviation in the field of science. In literature, no age has beenwanting in great woman writers, though there have been few of them. I lookeventually to see woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin, woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as ableas Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solelythe fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative, arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part--the very fact thatour clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequenceof it. The substitution of something else for these programmes, with theaccompanying change in the interests and reading of clubwomen, will be onestep toward the rationalisation of education--for all processes of thiskind are essentially educative. 

We need not despair of finding ultimately the exact differences in methodwhich, applied in the education of the sexes, will minimise such of thepresent mental differences as we desire to obliterate. Problems of thissort are solved usually by the discovery of some automatic process. Inthis case the key to such a process is the fact that the mentaldifferences between the sexes manifest themselves in differences ofinterest. 

Every parent of boys and girls knows that these differences begin early toshow themselves. We have been too prone to disregard them and tosubstitute a set of imagined differences that do not really exist. We goabout the moral training of the boy and the girl in precisely the sameway, although their moral points of view and susceptibilities differ indegree and kind; and then we marvel that we do not get precisely similarmoral products. But we assume that there is some natural objection to theclimbing of trees by girls, while it is all right for boys--an imaginarydistinction that has caused tears and heart-burnings. We are outgrowingthis particular imaginary distinction, and some others like it. Possiblywe may also outgrow our systems of co-education, so far as this means thesubjection of the male and the female mind to exactly the same processesof training. The training of the sexes in the same institution, with itsconsequent mental contact between them, has nothing to do with this, necessarily, and has advantages that cannot be overlooked. 

Whatever we do in school, our subsequent education, which goes on at leastas long as we inhabit this world, must be in and through social contact, men and women together. But if each sex is not true to itself and does notlive its own life, the results cannot be satisfactory. Reactions that aresought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirationsand mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just asthey would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is tolet the woman's mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just asthe man's always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, theirexercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be releasedfrom the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down andwill bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition. 

We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members ofwomen's clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is oftentrivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment. Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a totallack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligentprogramme-making. The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acuteprogramitis and the physician is in a position to consider whattherapeutic measures may be indicated. We shall endeavor to prescribe somesimple remedies. 

III--_The Remedy_

When we have once discovered the cause of a malady, we may proceed in twoways to combat it; either we may destroy the cause or we may render thepossible victims immune. To put it a little differently, we may eliminateeither of the two elements whose conjunction causes the disease. To growweeds, there must co-exist their seeds and a favourable soil. They may beexterminated either by killing the seeds or sterilising the soil. Eitherof these methods may be used in dealing with the disease that prevailsamong readers, or, if you prefer the other metaphor, with the rankvegetation that has choked the fertile soil of their minds, making anylegitimate mental crop impossible. We have seen that the conditionsfavorable to the disease are a lack of interest and a fallacious idea thatthere is something inherent in the printed page _per se_ that makes itsperusal valuable whether the reader is interested or not--somewhat as acharm is supposed to work even when it is in a language that the user doesnot understand. 

We are considering only the form of the disease that affects clubwomen, and this we have diagnosed as _programitis_--the imposition of a setprogramme of work--which, as an exciting cause, operates on the mentalsoil prepared by indifference and fetichism to produce the malady fromwhich so many are now suffering. 

I think physicians will generally agree that where the exciting cause canbe totally removed that method of dealing with the disease is far moreeffective than any attempt to secure immunity. I believe that in mostcases it is so in the present instance. 

In other words, my prescription is the abandonment, in nine cases out often, of the set programme, and the substitution of something that isinteresting primarily to each individual concerned. This is no newdoctrine. Listen to William James:

 Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing. .. . If we could recall for a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our thinking--they hang to each other by associated links, but the original source of interest in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed. 

If we are to exorcise this spirit of indifference that has settled downlike a miasma upon clubdom we must find James's original germ ofinterest--the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang. Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested insomething; few are supremely interested in the same thing. I shall notattempt to prove these, and what I shall have to say will be addressedonly to those who can accept them without proof. But I am convinced thatillustrations will occur at once to everyone. Who has not seen the man orwoman, the boy or girl who, apparently stupid, indifferent and able totalk only in monosyllables, is suddenly shocked into interest andvolubility by the mere chance mention of some subject ofconversation--birds, or religion, or Egyptian antiquities, or dolls, orskating, or Henry the Eighth? There are millions of these electric buttonsfor galvanising dumb clay into mental and spiritual life, and no one ofthem is likely to act upon more than a very few in a given company--thetheory of chances is against it. That is why no possible programme couldbe made that would fit more than a very small portion of a given club. Wehave seen that many club-programmes are made with an irreducible minimumof intelligence; but even a programme committee with superhuman intellectand angelic goodwill could never compass the solution of such a problem asthis. Nor will it suffice to abandon the general programme and endeavourto select for each speaker the subject that he would like best to studyand expound. No one knows what these subjects are but the owners of thehearts that love them. 

We have seen how the scientific and technical societies manage the matterand how well they succeed. They appoint a committee whose duty it is toreceive contributions and to select the worthiest among those presented. The matter then takes care of itself. These people are all interested insomething. They are finding out things by experimentation or thought; byinduction or deduction. It is the duty and the high pleasure of each totell his fellows of his discoveries. It is in this way that the individualgives of his best to the race--the triumph of the social instinct overselfishness. As this sort of intellectual profit-sharing becomes more andmore common, the reign of the social instinct will extend and strengthen. To do one's part toward such an end ought to be a pleasure, and this isone reason why this course is commended here to the women's clubs. 

Everyone, I repeat, is deeply interested in something. I am not talking ofidiots; there are no such in women's clubs. I have been telling some oddstories of clubwomen, in which they are represented as doing and sayingidiotic things. These stories are all true, and if one should take thetime to collect and print others, I do not suppose, as the sacred writersays, "that all the world could contain the books that should be written. "Things quite as idiotic as these that I have reported are said and done inevery city and every hamlet of these United States every day in the yearand every hour in the day--except possibly between three and five A. M. , and sometimes even then. Yet those who say and do these things are notidiots. When your friend Brown is telling you his pet anecdote for thethirty-fifth time, or when Smith insists that you listen to a recital ofthe uninteresting accomplishments of his newly-arrived infant, you mayallow your thoughts to wander and make some inane remark, yet you are notan idiot. You are simply not interested. You are using most of your mindin another direction and it is only with what is left of it that you hearBrown or Smith and talk to him. Brown or Smith is not dealing with yourpersonality as a whole, but with a residuum. 

And this is what is the matter with the clubwomen who read foolishly andask foolish questions in libraries. They are residual personalities. Notbeing at all interested in the matter in hand, they are devoting to itonly a minimum part of their brains; and what they do and say iscomparable with the act of the perambulating professor, who, absorbed inmathematical calculation, lifted his hat to the cow. 

The professor was perhaps pardonable, for his mind was not wandering--itwas suffering, on the contrary, from excessive concentration--but it wasnot concentrated on the cow. In the case of the clubwomen, the role of thecow is played by the papers that they are preparing, while, in lieu of themathematical problems, we have a variety of really absorbing subjects, more or less important, over which their minds are wandering. What we mustdo is to capture these wandering minds, and this we can accomplish only byenlisting their own knowledge of what interests them. 

If you would realise the difference between the mental processes of a mereresidue and those of the whole personality when its vigour is concentratedon one subject, listen first to one of those perfunctory essays, culledfrom a collection of cyclopædias, and then hear a whole woman throw herwhole self into something. Hear her candid opinion of some person or thingthat has fallen below her standard! Hear her able analysis of the case atlaw between her family and the neighbours! Hear her make a speech on womansuffrage--I mean when it is really to her the cause of causes; there arethose who take it up for other reasons, as the club-women do their papers, with not dissimilar results. In all these cases clearness of presentation, weight of invective, keenness of analysis spring from interest. None ofthese women, if she has a feminine mind, treats these things as a manwould. We men are very apt to complain of the woman's mental processes, for the same reason that narrow "patriots" always suspect and deride themethods of a foreigner, simply because they are strange and we do notunderstand them. But what we are compelled to think of the results isshown by the fact that when we are truly wise we are apt to seek theadvice and counsel of the other sex and to act upon it, even when wecannot fathom the processes by which it was reached. 

All the more reason this why the woman should be left to herself and notforced to model her club paper on the mental processes of a man, used withmany necessary elisions and sometimes with very bad workmanship, in theconstruction of the cyclopædia article never intended to be employed forany such purpose. 

Perhaps we can never make the ordinary clubwoman talk like Susan B. Anthony, or Anna Shaw, or Beatrice Hale, or Fola La Follette; any morethan we can put into the mouth of the ordinary business man the words ofLincoln, or John B. Gough, or Phillips Brooks, or Raymond Robins--but getsomehow into the weakest of either sex the impulses, the interests, theenergies that once stood or now stand behind the utterances of any one ofthese great Americans, and see if the result is not something worth while!An appreciative critic of the first paper in this series, writing in _TheYale Alumni Weekly_, gives it as his opinion that these readers are in thefirst stage of their education--that of "initial intellectual interest. "He says: "Curiosity, then suspicion, come later to grow into individualintellectual judgment. "

I wish I could agree that what we have diagnosed as a malady is only anearly stage of something that is ultimately to develop into maturedjudgment. But the facts seem clearly to show that, far from possessing"initial intellectual interest, " these readers are practically devoid ofany kind of interest whatever, properly speaking. Such as they have is notproper to the subject, but simply due to the fact that they desire toretain their club membership, to fulfil their club duties, and to act ingeneral as other women do in other clubs. To go back to our recent simile, it is precisely the same interest that keeps you listening, or pretendingto listen, to a bore, while you are really thinking of something else. Ifyou were free to follow your impulses, you would insult the bore, or throwhim downstairs, or retreat precipitately. You are inhibited by your senseof propriety and your recognition of what is due to a fellow-man, nomatter how boresome he may be. The clubwoman doubtless has a strongimpulse to throw the encyclopædia out of the window, or to insult thelibrarian (occasionally she does) or even to resign from the club. She isprevented, in like manner, by her sense of propriety, and often, too, wemust admit, by a real, though rudimentary, desire for knowledge. But suchinhibitions cannot develop into judgment. They are merely negative, whilethe interest that has a valuable outcome is positive. 

Another thing that we shall do well to remember is that no condition orrelation one of whose elements or factors is the human mind can ever beproperly considered apart from that mind. Shakespeare's plays would seemto be fairly unalterable. Shakespeare is dead and cannot change them, andthey have been written down in black and white this many a year. But thereal play, so far as it makes any difference to us to-day, is not in thebooks; or, at least, the book is but one of its elements. It is the effectproduced upon the auditor, and of this a very important element is theauditor's mental and spiritual state. Considered from this standpoint, Shakespeare's plays have been changing ever since they were written. Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed;the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint andodd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date, "to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day canunder any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare asthat of his original audience, and probably no one ever will. 

Anecdotes possess a sort of centripetal force; tales illustrative of thematter at hand have been flying to me from all parts of the country. Fromthe Pacific Northwest comes this, which seems pertinent just here. A goodclubwoman, who had been slaving all day over a paper on Chaucer, finallyat its close threw down her pen and exclaimed, "Oh, dear! I wish Chaucerwere _dead_!" She had her wish in more senses than the obvious one. Notonly has Chaucer's physical body long ago given up its substance to earthand air, but his works have to be translated for most readers of thepresent day; his language is fast becoming as dead as Latin or Greek. But, worse still, Ills very spirit was dead, so far as its reaction on her wasconcerned. Poetry, to you and me, is what we make of it; and what do yousuppose our friend from Oregon was making of Chaucer? Our indifference, our failure to react, is thus more far-reaching than its influence onourselves--it is, in some sense, a sin against the immortal souls of thosewho have bequeathed their spiritual selves to the world in books. And thissin the clubs are, in more cases than I care to think, forcingdeliberately upon their members. 

A well-known cartoonist toiled long in early life at some uncongenial taskfor a pittance. Meanwhile he drew pictures for fun, and one day ajournalist, seeing one of his sketches, offered him fifty dollars forit--the salary of many days. "And when, " said the cartoonist, "I found Icould get more money by playing than by working, I swore I would neverwork again--and I haven't. "

When we can all play--do exactly what we like--and keep ourselves and theworld running by it, then the Earthly Paradise will be achieved. But, meanwhile, cannot we realize that these clubwomen will accomplish more ifwe can direct and control their voluntary activity, backed by their wholemental energy, than when they devote some small part of their minds to anuncongenial task, dictated by a programme committee?

I shall doubtless be reminded that the larger clubs are now generallydivided into sections, and that membership in these sections is supposedto be dictated by interest. This is a step in the right direction, but itis an excessively short one. The programme, with all its viciousaccompaniments and lamentable results, persists. What I have said andshall say applies as well to an art or a domestic science section as to aclub _in toto_. 

To bring down the treatment to a definite prescription, let us supposethat the committee in charge of a club's activities, instead of markingout a definite programme for the season, should simply announce thatcommunications on subjects of personal interest to the members, embodyingsome new and original thought, method, idea, device, or mode of treatment, would be received, and that the best of these would be read and discussedbefore the club, after which some would appear in print. No conditionswould be stated, but it would be understood that such features as lengthand style, as well as subject matter, would be considered in selecting thepapers to be read. Above all, it would be insisted that no paper should beconsidered that was merely copied from anything, either in substance oridea. It is, of course, possible to constitute a paper almost entirely ofquotations and yet so to group and discuss these that the paper becomes anoriginal contribution to thought; but mere parrot-like repetition ofascertained facts, or of other people's thoughts, should not be tolerated. 

Right here the first obstacle would be encountered. Club members, accustomed to be assigned for study subjects like "The Metope of theParthenon" or "The True Significance of Hyperspace, " will not easilycomprehend that they are really desired to put briefly on paper originalideas about something that they know at first hand. Mrs. Jones makesbetter sponge cake than any one in town; the fact is known to all herfriends. If sponge cake is a desirable product, why should not the womanwho has discovered the little knack that turns failure into success, andwho is proud of her ability and special knowledge, tell her club of it, instead of laboriously copying from a book--or, let us say, from two orthree books--some one else's compilation of the facts ascertained atsecond or third hand by various other writers on "The Character of theCid"? Why should not Mrs. Smith, who was out over night in the blizzard of1888, recount lier experiences, mental as well as physical? Why should notMiss Robinson, who collects coins and differs from the acceptedauthorities regarding the authenticity of certain of her specimens, tellwhy and how and all about it? Why should not the member who is crazy aboutbegonias and the one who thinks she saw Uncle Hiram's ghost, and she whohas read and re-read George Meredith, seeing beauties in him that no oneelse ever detected--why should not one and all give their fellows thebenefit of the really valuable special knowledge that they have acquiredthrough years of interested thinking and talking and doing?

But there will be trouble, as I have said. The thing, simple as it is, would be too unaccustomed to comprehend. And then a real article in a realcyclopædia by a real writer is Information with a big "I. " My littleknowledge about making quince jelly, or darning stockings, or driving anauto, or my thoughts about the intellectual differences between Dickensand Thackeray, or my personal theories of conduct, or my reasons forpreferring hot-water heat to steam--these are all too trivial to mention;is it possible that you want me to write them down on paper?

It may thus happen that when the committee opens its mail it mayfind--nothing. What, then? Logically, I should be forced to say: Well, ifnone of your members is interested enough in anything to have someoriginal information to tell about it, disband your club. What is the useof it? Even three newsboys, when they meet on the street corner, begin atonce to interchange ideas. Where are yours?

Possibly this would be too drastic. It might be better to hold a meeting, state the failure, and adjourn for another trial. It might be well torepeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence oforiginal ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate. If thisdoes not work, it might be possible to fight the devil with fire, by goingback to the programme method so far as to assign definitely to memberssubjects in which they are known to be deeply interested. This, in fact, is the second method of treatment mentioned at the outset, namely, theendeavour to secure immunity where the germ cannot be exterminated. Weshall probably never be able to rid the world of the _bacillustuberculosis_; the best we can do is to keep as clear of it as we can andto strengthen our powers of resistance to it. So, if we cannot kill theprogramme all at once, let us strive to make it innocuous and to minimiseits evil effects on its victims. 

Let us suppose, now, that in one way or another, it is brought about thatevery club member who reads a paper is reporting the result of somepersonal experience in which her interest is vivid--some discovery, acquisition, method, idea, criticism or appreciation that is the productof her own life and of the particular, personal way in which she has livedit. 

What a result this will have on that woman's reading--on what she doesbefore she writes her paper and on what she goes through after it! If herinterest is as vivid as we assume it to be, she will not be content torecount her own experiences without comparing them with those of others. And after her paper has been read and the comment and criticism of otherinterested members have been brought out--of some, perhaps, whose interestshe had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse tosearch for new accounts and to devour them. There is no longer anythingperfunctory about the matter. She can no longer even trust the labour oflooking up her references to others. She becomes an investigator; shefeels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge. 

And lo! the problem of clubwomen's reading is solved! The wandering mindis captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest toform a normal, intelligent whole. No more idiotic questions, no morecyclopædia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes. Is it too much toexpect? Alas, we are but mortal!

I trust it has been made sufficiently clear that I think meanly neither ofthe intellectual ability of women nor of the services of women's clubs. The object of these papers is to give the former an opportunity to assertitself, and the latter a chance to profit by the assertion. The woman'sclub of the future should be a place where original ideas, fed anddirected by interested reading, are exchanged and discussed. Were Iwriting of men's clubs, I should point out to them the same goal. Andthen, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when a selected group of menand women may come together and talk of things in which they both, as menand women, are interested. 

When this happens, I trust that in the discussion we shall not heed theadvice of some modern feminists and forget that we are as God made us. Whyshould each man talk to a woman "as if she were another man"? I neverheard it advised that each woman should talk to each man "as if he wereanother woman"; but I should resent it if I did. Why shut our eyes to thetruth? I trust that I have not been talking to the club-women "as if theywere men"; I am sure I have not meant to do so. They are not men; theyhave their own ways, and those ways should be developed and encouraged. Wehave had the psychology of race, of the crowd and of the criminal; whereis the investigator who has studied the Psychology of Woman? When she(note the pronoun) has arrived, let us make her president of a woman'sclub. 

It is with diffidence that I have outlined any definite procedure, because, after all, the precise manner in which the treatment should beapplied will depend, of course, on the club concerned. To prescribe foryou most effectively, your physician should be an intimate friend. Heshould have known you from birth--better still, he should have cared foryour father and your grandfather before you. Otherwise, he prescribes foran average man; and you may be very far from the average. The drug that headministers to quiet your nerves may act on your heart and give you thesmothers--it might conceivably quiet you permanently. Then the doctorwould send to his medical journal a note on "A Curious Case of UmptiolPoisoning, " but you would still be dead, even if all his readers shouldagree with him. 

I have no desire to bring about casualties of this kind. Let those whoknow and love each particular club devote themselves to the task ofapplying my treatment to it in a way that will involve a minimum shock toits nerves and a minimum amount of interference with its metabolicprocesses. It will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and arevolution in clubdom is not going to be accomplished over night. 

I have prescribed simple remedies--too simple, I am convinced, to bereadily adopted. What could be simpler than to advise the extermination ofall germ diseases by killing off the germs? Any physician will tell youthat this method is the very acme of efficiency; yet, the germs are stillwith us, and bid fair to spread suffering and death over our planet formany a long year to come. So I am not sanguine that we shall be able allat once to kill off the programmes. All that may be expected is that atsome distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sortwill begin to commend itself to clubwomen. If, then, some lover of theolder literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomyera when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fairface of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of THEBOOKMAN, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content. 

BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES

The most distinctive thing about a book is the possibility that someonemay read it. Is this a truism? Evidently not; for the publishers, whoprint books, and the libraries, which store and distribute them, havenever thought it worth their while to collect and record informationbearing on this possibility. In the publisher's or the bookseller'sadvertising announcements, as well as on the catalogue cards stored in thelibrary's trays, the reader may ascertain when and where the book waspublished, the number of pages, and whether it contains plates or maps;but not a word of the size or style of type in which it is printed. Yet onthis depends the ability of the reader to use the book for the purpose forwhich it was intended. The old-fashioned reader was a mild-manneredgentleman. If he could not read his book because it was printed inoutrageously small type, he laid it aside with a sigh, or used amagnifying lens, or persisted in his attempts with the naked eye untileyestrain, with its attendant maladies, was the result. Lately however, the libraries have been waking up, and their readers with them. Theutilitarian side of the work is pushed to the front; and the reader is byno means disposed to accept what may be offered him, either in the contentof the book or its physical make-up. The modern library must adapt itselfto its users, and among other improvements must come an attempt to go asfar as possible in making books physiologically readable. 

Unfortunately the library cannot control the output of books, and mustlimit itself to selection. An experiment in such selection is now inprogress in the St. Louis Public Library. The visitor to that library willfind in its Open Shelf Room a section of shelving marked with the words"Books in large type. " To this section are directed all readers who havefound it difficult or painful to read the ordinary printed page but who donot desire to wear magnifying lenses. It has not been easy to fill theseshelves, for books in large type are few, and hard to secure, despite thefact that artists, printers, and oculists have for years been discussingthe proper size, form, and grouping of printed letters from their variousstandpoints. Perhaps it is time to urge a new view--that of the publiclibrarian, anxious to please his clients and to present literature to themin that physical form which is most easily assimilable and least harmful. 

Tired eyes belong, for the most part, to those who have worked themhardest; that is, to readers who have entered upon middle age or havealready passed through it. At this age we become conscious that the eye isa delicate instrument--a fact which, however familiar to us in theory, haspreviously been regarded with aloofness. Now it comes home to us. Thelength of a sitting, the quality, quantity, and incidence of the light, and above all, the arrangement of the printed page, become matters ofvital importance to us. A book with small print, or letters illegiblygrouped, or of unrecognizable shapes, becomes as impossible to us as if itwere printed in the Chinese character. 

It is an unfortunate law of nature that injurious acts appear to us intheir true light only after the harm is done. The burnt child dreads thefire after he has been burned--not before. So the fact that themiddle-aged man cannot read small, or crooked, or badly grouped type meanssimply that the harmfulness of these things, which always existed for him, has cumulated throughout a long tale of years until it has obtruded itselfupon him in the form of an inhibition. The books that are imperative forthe tired eyes of middle age, are equally necessary for those ofyouth--did youth but know it. Curiously enough, we are accustomed tobegin, in teaching the young to read, with very legible type. When theeyes grow stronger, we begin to maltreat them. So it is, also, with thedigestive organs, which we first coddle with pap, then treat awhile withpork and cocktails, and then, perforce, entertain with pap of the secondand final period. What correspond, in the field of vision, to pork andcocktails, are the vicious specimens of typography offered on all sides toreaders--in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers--typography thatis slowly but surely ruining the eyesight of those that need it most. 

Hitherto, the public librarian has been more concerned with the minds andthe morals of his clientele than with that physical organism without whichneither mind nor morals would be of much use. It would be easy to pick outon the shelves of almost any public library books that are a physiologicalscandal, printed in type that it is an outrage to place before anyself-respecting reader. I have seen copies of "Tom Jones" that I should bewilling to burn, as did a puritanical British library-board of newspapernotoriety. My reasons, however, would be typographic, not moral, and Imight want to add a few copies of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "TheSaint's Everlasting Rest, " without prejudice to the authors' share inthose works, which I admire and respect. Perhaps it is too much to ask forcomplete typographical expurgation of our libraries. But, at least, readers with tired eyes who do not yet wear, or care to wear, correctivelenses, should be able to find, somewhere on the shelves, a collection ofworks in relatively harmless print--large and black, clear in outline, simple and distinctive in form, properly grouped and spaced. 

The various attempts to standardize type-sizes and to adopt a suitablenotation for them have been limited hitherto to the sizes of the type-bodyand bear only indirectly on the size of the actual letter. More or lessarbitrary names--such as minion, bourgeois, brevier, and nonpareil, --wereformerly used; but what is called the point-system is now practicallyuniversal, although its unit, the "point, " is not everywhere the same. Roughly speaking, a point is one-seventy-second of an inch, so that inthree-point type, for example, the thickness of the type-body, from thetop to the bottom of the letter on its face, is one-twenty-fourth of aninch. But on this type-body the face may be large or small--although ofcourse, it cannot be larger than the body, --and the size of the letterscalled by precisely the same name in the point notation may vary withinpretty wide limits. There is no accepted notation for the size of theletters themselves, and this fact tells, more eloquently than words, thatthe present sizes of type are standardized and defined for compositorsonly, not for readers, and still less for scientific students of theeffect upon the readers' eyes of different arrangements of the printedpage. 

What seems to have been the first attempt to define sizes of type suitablefor school grades was made fifteen years ago by Mr Edward R. Shaw in his"School Hygiene"; he advocates sizes from eighteen-point in the first yearto twelve-point for the fourth. "Principals, teachers, and schoolsuperintendents, " he says, "should possess a millimetre measure and amagnifying glass, and should subject every book presented for theirexamination to a test to determine whether the size of the letters and thewidth of the leading are of such dimensions as will not prove injurious tothe eyes of children. " To this list, librarians might be well added--notto speak of authors, editors, and publishers. In a subsequent part of hischapter on "Eyesight and Hearing, " from which the above sentence isquoted, appears a test of illumination suggested by "The Medical Record"of Strasburg, which may serve as a "horrid example" in some such way asdid the drunken brother who accompanied the temperance lecturer. Accordingto this authority, if a pupil is unable to read diamondtype--four-and-one-half-point--"at twelve-inch distance and withoutstrain, " the illumination is dangerously low. The adult who tries theexperiment will be inclined to conclude that whatever the illumination, the proper place for the man who uses diamond type for any purpose is thepenitentiary. 

The literature upon this general subject, such as it is, is concernedlargely with its relations with school hygiene. We are bound to give ourchildren a fair start in life, in conditions of vision as well as in otherrespects, even if we are careless about ourselves. The topic of"Conservation of Vision, " in which, however, type-size played but a smallpart, was given special attention at the Fourth International Congress ofSchool Hygiene, held in Buffalo in 1913. Investigations on the subject, sofar as they affect the child in school, are well summed up in the lastchapter of Huey's "Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. " In general, theconsensus of opinion of investigators seems to be that the most legibletype is that between eleven-point and fourteen-point. Opinion regardingspace between lines, due to "leading, " is not quite so harmonious. Someauthorities think that it is better to increase the size of the letters;and Huey asserts that an attempt to improve unduly small type by makingwide spaces between lines is a mistake. 

As to the relative legibility of different type-faces, one of the mostexhaustive investigations was that made at Clark University by MissBarbara E. Roethlin, whose results were published in 1912. This studyconsiders questions of form, style, and grouping, independently of meresize; and the conclusion is that legibility is a product of six factors, of which size is one, the others being form, heaviness of face, width ofthe margin around the letter, position in the letter-group, and shape andsize of adjoining letters. For "tired eyes" the size factor would appearof overwhelming importance except where the other elements make the pagefantastically illegible. In Miss Roethlin's tables, based upon acombination of the factors mentioned above, the maximum of legibilityalmost always coincides with that of size. These experiments seem to haveinfluenced printers, whose organization in Boston has appointed acommittee to urge upon the Carnegie Institution the establishment of adepartment of research to make scientific tests of printing-types inregard to the comparative legibility and the possibility of improving someof their forms. Their effort, so far, has met with no success; but thefunds at the disposal of this body could surely be put to no better use. 

With regard to the improvement of legibility by alteration of form, it hasbeen recognized by experiments from the outset that the letters of ouralphabet, especially the small, or "lower-case" letters, are not equallylegible. Many proposals for modifying or changing them have been made, some of them odd or repugnant. It has been suggested, for instance, thatthe Greek lambda be substituted for our _l_, which in its present form iseasily confused with the dotted _i_. Other pairs of letters (_u_ and _n_, _o_ and _e_, for example) are differentiated with difficulty. Theprivilege of modifying alphabetic form is one that has been frequentlyexercised. The origin of the German alphabet and our own, for instance, isthe same, and no lower-case letters in any form date further back than theMiddle Ages. There could be no well-founded objection to any change, inthe interests of legibility, that is not so far-reaching as to make thewhole alphabet look foreign and unfamiliar. It may be queried, however, whether the lower-case alphabet had not better be reformed by abolishingit altogether. There would appear to be no good reason for using twoalphabets, now one and now the other, according to arbitrary rules, difficult to learn and hard to remember. That the general legibility ofbooks would benefit by doing away with this mediaeval excrescence appearsto admit of no doubt, although the proposal may seem somewhat startling tothe general reader. 

In 1911, a committee was appointed by the British Association for theAdvancement of Science "to inquire into the influence of school-books uponeyesight. " This committee's report dwells on the fact that the child's eyeis still in process of development and needs larger type than the fullydeveloped eye of the adult. In making its recommendation for thestandardization of school-book type, which it considers the solution ofthe difficulty, the committee emphasizes the fact that forms and sizesmost legible for isolated letters are not necessarily so for the groupsthat need to be quickly recognized by the trained reader. It dwells uponthe importance of unglazed paper, flexible sewing, clear, boldillustrations, black ink, and true alignment. Condensed or compressedletters are condemned, as are long serifs and hair strokes. On the otherhand, very heavy-faced type is almost as objectionable as that with thefine lines, the ideal being a proper balancing of whites and blacks ineach letter and group. The size of the type face, as we might expect, ispronounced by the committee "the most important factor in the influence ofbooks upon vision"; it describes its recommended sizes in millimetres--arefinement which, for the purposes of this article, need not be insistedupon. Briefly, the sizes run from thirty-point, for seven-year-oldchildren, to ten-point or eleven-point, for persons more than twelve yearsold. Except as an inference from this last recommendation, the committee, of course, does not exceed its province by treating of type-sizes foradults; yet it would seem that it considers ten-point as the smallest sizefit for anyone, however good his sight. This would bar much of ourexisting reading matter. 

A writer whose efforts in behalf of sane typography have had practicalresults is Professor Koopman, librarian of Brown University, whose pleahas been addressed chiefly to printers. Professor Koopman dwellsparticularly on the influence of short lines on legibility. The eye mustjump from the end of each line back to the beginning of the next, and thisjump is shorter and less fatiguing with the shorter line, though it mustbe oftener performed. Owing largely to his demonstration, "The PrintingArt, " a trade magazine published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has changedits make-up from a one-column to a two-column page. It should be noted, however, that a uniform, standard length of line is even more to bedesired than a short one. When the eye has become accustomed to one lengthfor its linear leaps, these leaps can be performed with relative ease andcan be taken care of subconsciously. When the lengths vary capriciouslyfrom one book, or magazine, to another, or even from one page to another, as they so often do, the effort to get accustomed to the new length ismore tiring than we realize. Probably this factor, next to the size oftype, is most effective in tiring the middle-aged eye, and in keeping ittired. The opinion may be ventured that the reason for our continuedtoleration of the small type used in the daily newspapers is that theircolumns are narrow, and still more, that these are everywhere ofpractically uniform width. 

The indifference of publishers to the important feature of the physicalmake-up of books appears from the fact that in not a single case is itincluded among the descriptive items in their catalogue entries. Librariesare in precisely the same class of offenders. A reader or a possiblepurchaser of books is supposed to be interested in the fact that a book ispublished in Boston, has four hundred and thirty-two pages, and isillustrated, but not at all in its legibility. Neither publishers norlibraries have any way of getting information on the subject, except bygoing to the books themselves. Occasionally a remainder-catalogue, containing bargains whose charms it is desired to set forth with unusualdetail, states that a certain book is in "large type, " or even in "fine, large type, " but these words are nowhere defined, and the purchaser cannotdepend on their accuracy. An edition of Scott, recently advertisedextensively as in "large, clear type, " proved on examination to be printedin ten-point. 

In gathering the large-type collection for the St. Louis Libraryfourteen-point was decided upon as the standard, which means, of course, types with a face somewhere between the smallest size that is usuallyfound on a fourteen-point body, even if actually on a smaller body, andthe largest that this can carry, even if on a larger body. The latter isunusually large, but it would not do to place the standard belowfourteen-point, because that would lower the minimum, which is none toolarge as it is. The first effort was to collect such large-type books, already in the library, as would be likely to interest the general reader. In the collection of nearly 400, 000 volumes, it was found by diligentsearch that only 150 would answer this description. Most octavo volumes oftravel are in large type, but only a selected number of these was placedin the collection to avoid overloading it with this particular class. Thisstatement applies also to some other classes, and to certain types ofbooks, such as some government reports and some scientific monographs, which have no representatives in the group. The next step was tosupplement the collection by purchase. All available publishers'catalogues were examined, but after a period of twelve months it was foundpossible to spend only $65. 00 in the purchase of 120 additional books. Acircular letter was then sent to ninety-two publishers, explaining thepurpose of the collection and asking for information regarding books infourteen-point type, or larger, issued by them. To these there werereceived sixty-three answers. In twenty-nine instances, no books in typeof this size were issued by the recipients of the circulars. In six cases, the answer included brief lists of from two to twelve titles of large-typebooks; and in several other cases, the publishers stated that the labor ofascertaining which of their publications are in large type would beprohibitive, as it would involve actual inspection of each and everyvolume on their lists. In two instances, however, after a second letter, explaining further the aims of the collection, publishers promised toundertake the work. The final result has been that the Library now hasover four hundred volumes in the collection. This is surely not animposing number, but it appears to represent the available resources of acountry in which 1, 000 publishers are annually issuing 11, 000 volumes--tosay nothing of the British and Continental output. In the list of thecollection and in the entries, the size of the type, the leading, and thesize of the book itself are to be distinctly stated. The last-mentioneditem is necessary because the use of large type sometimes involves a heavyvolume, awkward to hold in the hand. The collection for adults in the St. Louis Library, as it now exists, may be divided into the followingclasses, according to the reasons that seem to have prompted the use oflarge type:

1. Large books printed on a somewhat generous scale and intended to sellat a high price, the size of the type being merely incidental to thisplan. These include books of travel, history, or biography in severalvolumes, somewhat high-priced sets of standard authors, and books intendedfor gifts. 

2. Books containing so little material that large type, thick paper, andwide margins were necessary to make a volume easy to handle and use. Theseinclude many short stories of magazine length, which for some inscrutablereason are now often issued in separate form. 

3. Books printed in large type for aesthetic reasons. These are few, beauty and artistic form being apparently linked in some way withillegibility by many printers, no matter what the size of the type-face. 

The large-type collection is used, not only by elderly persons, but alsoin greater number by young persons whose oculists forbid them to read fineprint, or who do not desire to wear glasses. The absence of a wide rangein the collection drives others away to books that are, doubtless, in manycases bad for their eyes. Some books that have not been popular in thegeneral collection have done well here, while old favorites have not beentaken out. Such facts as these mean little with so limited a collection. Until readers awake to the dangers of small print and the comfort of largetype there will not be sufficient pressure on our publishers to inducethem to put forth more books suitable for tired eyes. It is probably toomuch to expect that the trade itself will try to push literature whoseprinted form obeys the rules of ocular hygiene. All that we can reasonablyask is that type-size shall be reported on in catalogues, so that thosewho want books in large type may know what is obtainable and where to gofor it. 

It has often been noted that physicians are the only class of professionalmen whose activities, if properly carried on, tend directly to make theprofession unnecessary. Medicine tends more and more to be preventiverather than curative. We must therefore look to the oculists to take thefirst steps towards lessening the number of their prospective patients byinculcating rational notions about the effects of the printed page on theeye. Teachers, librarians, parents, the press--all can do their part. Andwhen a demand for larger print has thus been created the trade willrespond. Meanwhile, libraries should be unremitting in their efforts toascertain what material in large type already exists, to collect it, andto call attention to it in every legitimate way. 

THE MAGIC CASEMENT[16]

 [16] Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis. 

Anyone who talks or writes about the "movies" is likely to bemisunderstood. There is little to be said now about the moving picture asa moving picture, unless one wants to discuss its optics or mechanics. Thetime is past when anyone went to see a moving picture as a curiosity. Itwas once the eighth wonder of the world; it long ago abdicated thatposition to join its dispossessed brothers the telephone, the X-ray, thewireless telegraph and the phonograph. What we now go to see is not themoving picture, but what the moving picture shows us; it is no more than awindow through which we gaze--the poet's "magic casement" opening(sometimes) "on the foam of perilous seas. " We may no more praise orcondemn the moving picture for what it shows us than we may praise orcondemn a proscenium arch or the glass in a show window. 

The critic who thinks that the movies are lowering our tastes, or doinganything else objectionable, as well as he who thinks they are educatingthe masses, is not of the opinion that the moving pictures are doing thesethings because they show moving objects on a screen, but because of thecharacter of what is photographed for such exhibition. 

Thoughts on the movies, therefore, must be rather thoughts on things thatare currently shown us by means of the movies; thoughts also on some ofthe things that we might see and do not. I have compared the screen aboveto a proscenium arch and a show window, but both of these are selective:the screen is as broad as the world. It is especially adapted to showrealities; through it one may see the coast of Dalmatia as viewed from asteamer, the habits of animals in the African jungle, or the play ofemotion on the faces of an audience at a ball game in Philadelphia. I ampleased to see that more and more of these interesting realities are showndaily in the movie theatres. There has been a determined effort to makethem unpopular by calling them "educational, " but they seem likely tooutlive it. One is educated, of course, by everything that he sees ordoes, but why rub it in? The boy who thoroughly likes to go sailing willget more out of it than he who goes because he thinks it will be "aneducational experience. " As one who goes to the movies I confess that Ienjoy its realities. Probably they educate me, and I take that with duemeekness. Some of these realities I enjoy because they are unfamiliar, like the boiling of the lava lake in the Hawaiian craters and the changingcrowds in the streets of Manila; some because they are familiar, like acollege foot-ball game or the movement of vessels in the North River atNew York. 

I like the realities, too, in the dramatic performances that still occupyand probably will continue to occupy, most of the time at a movie theatre. Here I come into conflict with the producer. Like every other adapter hecan not cut loose from the old when he essays the new. We no longer wearswords, but we still carry the buttons for the sword belt, and it is onlyrecently that semi-tropic Americans gave up the dress of north-temperateEurope. So the movie producer can not forget the theatre. Now the theatrehas some advantages that the movie can never attain--notably the use ofspeech. The movie, on the other hand, has unlimited freedom of scene andthe use of real backgrounds. We do not object to a certain amount of whatwe call "staginess" on the stage--it is a part of its art; as the pigmentis part of that of the painter. We are surrounded by symbols; we are notsurprised that costume, gesture and voice are also symbolic instead ofpurely natural. But in the moving picture play it is, or should be, different. The costume and make-up, the posture and gesture, that seemappropriate in front of a painted house or tree on a back-drop, become soout-of-place as to be repulsive when one sees them in front of a realhouse and real trees, branches moving in the wind, running water--all thefamiliar accompaniments of nature. The movie producers, being unable toget away from their stage experience, are failing to grasp theiropportunity. Instead of creating a drama of reality to correspond with thereal environment that only the movie can offer, they are abandoning theunique advantages of that environment, to a large degree. They build fakecities, they set all their interiors in fake studio rooms, whereeverything is imitation; even when they let us see a bit of outdoors, itis not what it pretends to be. We have all seen, on the screen, bluffs 200feet high on the coast of Virginia and palm trees growing in the boroughof the Bronx. And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest ofstage plots in as stagy a way as they know how. I am taking the movieseriously because I like it and because I see that I share that likingwith a vast throng of persons with whom it is probably the only thing Ihave in common--persons separated from me by differences of training andeducation that would seem to make a common ground of any kind well-nighimpossible. With some persons the fact that the movie is democratic putsit outside the pale at once. Nothing, in their estimation, is worthdiscussing unless appreciation of it is limited to the few. Their attitudeis that of the mother who said to the nurse: "Go and see what baby isdoing, and tell him he musn't. " "Let us, " they say "find out what peoplelike, and then try to make them like something else. " To such I havenothing to say. We ought rather, I believe, to find out the kind of thingthat people like and then do our best to see that they get it in the bestquality--that it is used in every way possible to pull them out of themud, instead of rubbing their noses further in. 

On the other hand, some capable critics, like Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton, decry the movies because they are undemocratic--because they are offeringa form of entertainment appealing only to the uneducated and thussegregating them from the educated, who presumably all attend the regulartheatre, sitting in the parquet at two dollars per. One wonders whetherMr. Eaton has attended a moving-picture theatre since 1903. I believe themovie to be by all odds the most democratic form of intellectual (by whichI mean non-physical) entertainment ever offered; and I base my belief onwide observation of audiences in theatres of many different grades. Nowthis democracy shows itself not only in the composition of audiences butin their manifestations of approval. I do not mean that everyone in anaudience always likes the same thing. Some outrageous "slap-stick" comedyrejoices one and offends another. A particularly foolish plot may satisfyin one place while it bores in another. But everywhere I find one thingthat appeals to everybody--realism. Just as soon as there appears on thescreen something that does not know how to pose and is forced by nature tobe natural--an animal or a young child, for instance--there are immediatemanifestations of interest and delight. 

The least "stagy" actors are almost always favorites. Mary Pickford standsat the head. There is not an ounce of staginess in her make-up. She wasnever particularly successful on the stage. Some of her work seems to meideal acting for the screen--simple, appealing, absolutely true. Of courseshe is not always at her best. 

To the stage illusions that depend on costume and make-up, the screen isparticularly unfriendly. Especially in the "close-ups" the effect issimilar to that which one would have if he were standing close to theactor looking directly into his face. It is useless to depend on ordinarymake-up under these circumstances. Either it should be of the descriptionused by Sherlock Holmes and other celebrated detectives (we rely onhearsay) which deceives the very elect at close quarters, or else theproducer must choose for his characters those that naturally "look theparts. " In particular, the lady who, although long past forty, continuesto play _ingenue_ parts and "gets away with it" on the stage, must getaway _from_ it, when it comes to the screen. The "close up" tells the sadstory at once. The part of a sixteen-year-old girl must be played by areal one. Another concession to realism, you see. And what is true ofpersons is true of their environment. I have already registered mydisapproval of the "Universal City" type of production. It is almost aseasy for the expert to pick out the fake Russian village or the pasteboardVirginia court-house as it is for him to spot the wrinkles in thecountenance of the school girl who left school in 1892. Next to a fakeenvironment the patchwork scene enrages one--the railway that isdouble-track with 90-pound rails in one scene and single-track withstreaks of rust in the next; the train that is hauled in quick successionby locomotives of the Mogul type, the Atlantic and the wood-burningvintage of 1868. There is here an impudent assumption in the producer, ofa lack of intelligence in his audience, that is quite maddening. The samelack of correspondence appears between different parts of the same street, and between the outside and inside of houses. I am told by friends that Iam quite unreasonable in the extent to which I carry my demands forrealism in the movies. "What would you have?" they ask. I would have aproducing company that should advertise, "We have no studio" and use onlyreal backgrounds--the actual localities represented. "Do you mean to tellme, " my friend goes on, "that you would carry your company to Spainwhenever the scene of their play is laid in that country? The expensewould be prohibitive. " I most certainly should not, and this because ofthe very realism that I am advocating. Plays laid in Spain should be actednot only in Spain but by Spaniards. The most objectionable kind of fake isthat in which Americans are made to do duty for Spaniards, Hindus orJapanese when their appearance, action and bearing clearly indicate thatthey were born and brought up in Skowhegan, Maine or Crawfordsville, Indiana. I have seen Mary Pickford in "Madame Butterfly", and I testifysadly that not even she can succeed here. No; if we want Spanish plays letus use those made on Spanish soil. Let us have free interchange of filmsbetween all film-producing countries. All the change required would betranslating the captions, or better still, plays might be produced thatrequire no captions. This might mean the total reorganization of themovie-play business in this country--a revolution which I should view withequanimity. Speaking of captions, here again the average producer appearsto agree with Walter Pritchard Eaton that he is catering only to theuneducated. The writers of most captions seem, indeed, to have abandonedformal instruction in the primary school. Why should not a movie captionbe good literature? Some of them are. The Cabiria captions were fine:though I do not admire that masterpiece. I am told that D'Annunziocomposed them with care, and equal care was evidently used in thetranslation. The captions of the George Ade fables are uniformly good, andthere are other notable exceptions. Other places where knowledge oflanguage is required are inadequately taken care of. Letters from eminentpersons make one want to hide under the chairs. These persons usually signthemselves "Duke of Gandolfo" or "Secretary of State Smith. " Are grammarschool graduates difficult to get, or high-priced? I beg you to observethat here again lack of realism is my objection. 

But divers friends interpose the remark that the movies are already toorealistic. "They leave nothing to the imagination. " If this were so, itwere a grievous fault--at any rate in so far as the moving-picture playaims at being an art-form. All good art leaves something to theimagination. As a matter of fact, however, the movie is the exactcomplement of the spoken play as read from a book. Here we have the wordsin full, the scene and action being left to the imagination except asbriefly sketched in the stage direction. In the movie we have scene andaction in full, the words being left to the imagination except as brieflyindicated in the captions. Where captions are very full the form mayperhaps be said to be complementary to the novel, where besides the wordswe are given a written description of scene and action that is often fullof detail. The movie leaves just as much to the imagination as the novel, but what is so left is different in the two cases. Do I think thateveryone in a movie audience makes use of his privilege to imagine whatthe actors are saying? No; neither does the novel-reader always image thescene and action. This does not depend on ignorance or the reverse, but onimaging power. Exceptional visual and auditive imaging power are rarelypresent in the same individual. I happen to have the former. Iautomatically see everything of which I read in a novel, and when thedescriptions are not detailed, this gets me into trouble. On a secondreading my imaged background may be different and when the earlier oneasserts itself there is a conflict that I can compare only to hearing twotunes played at once. Persons having already good visual imaging powershould develop their auditive imaging power by going to the movies andhearing what the actors say; these with deficient visual imagery shouldread novels and see the scenery. But to say that the movies allow no scopefor the imagination is absurd. As I said at the outset, the movie play isjust a play seen through the medium of a moving picture. It is like seeinga drama near enough to note the slightest play of feature and at the sametime so far away that the actors can not be heard--somewhat like seeing adistant play through a fine telescope. The action should therefore differin no respect from what would be proper if the words were intended to beheard. Doubtless this imposes a special duty upon both the author of thescenario and the producer, and they do not always respond to it. Action isintroduced that fails to be intelligible without the words, and to clearit up the actors are made to use pantomime. Pantomime is an interestingand valuable form of dramatic art, but it is essentially symbolic andstagy and has, I believe, no place in the moving picture play as we havedeveloped it. If owing to the faulty construction of the play, or a lackof skill on the part of producer or actors, all sorts of gestures andgrimaces become necessary that would not be required if the words wereheard, the production can not be considered good. Sometimes, of course, words are _seen_; though not heard. The story of the deaf mutes who readthe lips of the movie actors, and detected remarks not at all inconsonance with the action of the play, is doubtless familiar. It crops upin various places and is as ubiquitous as Washington's Headquarters. It isgood enough to be true, but I have never run it to earth yet. Even thoseof us who are not deaf-mutes, however, may detect an exclamation now andthen and it gives great force to the action, though I doubt whether it isquite legitimate in a purely picture-play. 

I beg leave to doubt whether realism is fostered by a method of productionsaid to be in vogue among first rate producers; namely keeping actors inignorance of the play and directing the action as it goes on. 

"Come in now, Mr. Smith; sit in that chair; cross your legs; light acigar; register perplexity; you hear a sound; jump to your feet"--and soon. This may save the producer trouble, but it reduces the actors tomarionettes; it is not thus that masterpieces are turned out. 

Is there any chance of a movie masterpiece, anyway? Yes, but not in thedirection that most producers see it. What Vachell Lindsay calls"Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature ofthem--the moving of masses of people amid great architecturalconstruction--sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs--but all this is akin toscenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One cannot make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be theview of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far, the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacularmovies has been poor. It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of aNation and not much better in Cabiria. Judith of Bethulia (after T. B. Aldrich) is the best acted "splendor" play that I have seen. Masterpiecesare coming not through spending millions on supes, and "real" temples, andforts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted tofilm-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for thecamera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting outall unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simpleand as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw wasin a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis. It was a dramatization of FrankNorris's "McTeague. " I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I neverheard of the actors, before or since. But most of it was fine, sincerework, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movieplay. 

One trouble is that up to date, neither producers nor actors nor the mostintelligent and best educated part of the audience take the moviesseriously. Here is one of the marvels of modern times; something that hascaptured the public as it never was captured before. And yet most of uslook at it as a huge joke, or as something intended to entertain thepopulace, at which we, too are graciously pleased to be amused. It mightmend matters if we could have every day in some reputable paper a columnof readable serious stuff about the current movie plays--real criticism, not simply the producer's "blurb. "

Possibly, too, a partnership between the legitimate stage and the moviemay be possible and I shall devote to a somewhat wild scheme of this sortthe few pages that remain to me. To begin with, the freedom enjoyed by theElizabethan dramatists from the limitations imposed by realistic sceneryhas not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in their art. Theirswas a true _drame libre_, having its analogies with the present attemptsof the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme andmetre. But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from itsrestrictions, the _mise-en-scéne_ in the drama has continually, with theattempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands onthe real vitality of the stage. 

Those who periodically wonder why the dramatists of the Elizabethanage--the greatest productive period in the history of the Englishstage--no longer hold the stage, with the exception of Shakespeare, andwho lament that even Shakespeare is yielding his traditional place, haveapparently given little thought to this loss of freedom as a contributingcause. While the writers of _vers libre_ have so far freed themselves thatsome of them have ceased to write poetry at all, it is a question whetherthe scenic freedom of the old dramatists may not have played such a vitalpart in the development of their art, that they owed to it at least someof their pre-eminence. 

Shakespeare's plays, as Shakespeare wrote them, read better than they act. Hundreds of Shakespeare-lovers have reached this conclusion, and many morehave reached it than have dared to put it into words. The reason is, itseems to me, that we can not, on the modern stage, enact the plays ofShakespeare as he intended them to be acted--as he really wrote them. 

If we compare an acting edition of any of the plays with the text aspresented by any good editor, this becomes increasingly clear. Shakespearein his original garb, is simply impossible for the modern stage. 

The fact that the Elizabethan plays were given against an imaginaryback-ground enabled the playwright to disregard the old, hampering unityof place more thoroughly than has ever been possible since his time. Hisability to do so, was the result not of any reasoned determination to sethis plays without "scenery, " but simply of environment. As the scenic artprogressed, the backgrounds became more and more realistic and less andless imaginary. The imagination of the audience, however, has always beenmore or less requisite to the appreciation of drama, as of any other art. No stage tree or house has ever been close enough to its original todeceive the onlooker. He always knows that they are imitations, intendedonly to aid the imagination, and his imagination has always been obligedto do its part. In Shakespeare's time the imagination did all the work;and as imaginary houses and trees have no weight, the services of thescene-shifter were not required to remove them and to substitute others. The scene could be shifted at once from a battlefield in Flanders to apalace in London and after the briefest of dialogues it could change againto a street in Genoa--all without inconveniencing anyone or necessitatinga halt in the presentation of the drama. Any reflective reader ofShakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to shift scenes, whichafter all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessedand still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of viewthat was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama ofthe Ancients. Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid ofintense power--a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of passion orexaltation. The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does notfocus, it is diffuse--a congeries of episodes, successive orsimultaneous--something not re-producible by the ancient dramatic methods. 

Today, while we have not gone back to the terrific force of the Greekunified presentation, we have lost this breadth. We strive for it, but wecan no longer reach it because of the growth of an idea that realism in_mise-en-scéne_ is absolutely necessary. Of course this idea has beeninjurious to the drama in more ways than the one that we are nowconsidering. The notable reform in stage settings associated with thenames of Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Urban, Hume and others, arisesfrom a conviction that _mise-en-scéne_ should inspire and reflect amood--should furnish an atmosphere, rather than attempt to reproducerealistic details. To a certain extent these reforms also operate tosimplify stage settings and hence to make a little more possible the quicktransitions and the play of viewpoint which I regard as one of the gloriesof the Elizabethan drama. This simplification, however, is very far from areturn to the absolute simplicity of the Elizabethan setting. Moreover, itis doubtful whether the temper of the modern audience is favorable to agreat change in this direction. We live in an age of realistic detail andwe must yield to the current, while using it, so far as possible, to gainour ends. 

This being the case, it is certainly interesting to find that, entirelywithout the aid or consent of those who have at heart the interests of thedrama, a new dramatic form has grown up which caters to the utmost to themodern desire for realistic detail--far beyond the dreams of ordinarystage settings--and at the same time makes possible the quick transitionsthat are the glory of the Elizabethan drama. Here, of course, is where wemake connection with the moving picture, whose fascinating realism andfreedom from the taint of the footlights have perhaps been sufficientlyinsisted upon in what has been already said. In the moving picture, withthe possibility of realistic backgrounds such as no skill, no money, noopportunity could build up on the ordinary stage--distant prospects, marvels of architecture, waving trees and moving animals--comes theability of passing from one environment to another, on the other side ofthe globe perhaps, in the twinkling of an eye. The transitions of theElizabethan stage sink into insignificance beside the possibilities of themoving-picture screen. Such an alternation as is now common in the filmplay, where two characters, talking to each other over the telephone, areseen in quick succession, would be impossible on the ordinary stage. TheElizabethan auditor, if his imagination were vivid and ready, mightpicture such a background of castle or palace or rocky coast as nophotographer could produce; but even such imagination takes time to getunder way, whereas the screen-picture gets to the brain through the retinainstantly. 

It is worth our while, I think, to consider whether this kind of scenery, rich in detail, but immaterial and therefore devoid of weight, could notbe used in connection with the ordinary drama. There are obstacles, butthey do not appear insuperable. The ordinary moving-picture, of course, ismuch smaller than the back drop of a large stage. Its enlargement ismerely a matter of optical apparatus. Wings must be reduced in number andprovided each with its own projection-machine, or replaced with dropssimilarly provided. Exits and entrances must be managed somewhatdifferently than with ordinary scenery. All this is surely not beyond thepower of modern stagecraft, which has already surmounted such obstaclesand accomplished such wonders. The projection, it is unnecessary to say, must be from behind, not from before, to avoid throwing the actors'shadows on the scenery. There must still, of course, be lighting from thefront, and the shadow problem still exists, but no more than it does withordinary scenery. Its solution lies in diffusing the light. No spotlightcould be used, and its enforced absence would be one of the incidentalblessings of the moving scene. 

The advantages of this moving-picture scenery would be many and obvious. Prominent among them of course are fidelity to nature and richness ofdetail. The one, however, on which I desire to lay stress here is theflexibility in change of scene that we have lost with the introduction ofheavy material "scenery" on our stages. This flexibility would be regainedwithout the necessity of discarding scenery altogether and going back tothe Elizabethan reliance on the imagination of the audience. 

Of course, moving scenery would not be required or desired in all dramaticproductions--only in those where realistic detail combined with perfectflexibility and rapidity of change in scene seems to be indicated. Thescenery should of course be colored, and while we are waiting for thecommercial tri-chroic picture with absolutely true values, we may getalong very well with the di-chroic ones, such as those turned out with theso-called Kinemacolor process. Those who saw the wonderful screenreproduction of the Indian durbar, several years ago, will realize thepossibilities. 

And more than all else, may we not hope that these new backgrounds mayreact on the players who perform their parts in front of them? Notnecessarily; for we have seen that it does not always do so in the presentmovie play. But I am confident that the change will come. Little by littlethe necessities of the case are developing actors who act naturally. Onemay pose in a canoe on a painted rapid; but how can he do so in the realwater course, where every attitude, every play of the muscles must beadapted to the real propulsion of the boat?

In short, the movie may ultimately require its presenters to be real, andso may come a school of realism in acting that may have its uses on thelegitimate stage also. 

Who will be the first manager to experiment with this new adjunct to theart of the stage?

A WORD TO BELIEVERS[17]

 [17] Address at the closing session of the Church School of Religious Instruction, St. Louis. 

People may be divided into a great many different classes according totheir attitude toward belief and beliefs--toward the meaning and value ofbelief in general--toward their own beliefs and those of their neighbors. We have the man who does not know what "belief" means, and who does notcare; the man whose idea of its meaning is perverse and wrong; the man whothinks his own beliefs are important and those of his neighbors areunimportant; the man who thinks it proper to base belief on certainconsiderations and not on others--the man, for instance, who will say hebelieves that two plus two equals four, but can not believe in theexistence of God because the grounds for such belief can not be stated inthe same mathematical symbols. These are only a few of the classes thatmight be defined, using this interesting basis of classification. Butbefore we can take up the question of instruction in the church's beliefs, about which I have been asked to address you this evening, we mustrecognize the existence of these classes, and possibly the fact that youyourselves are not all in accord in the way in which you look at thesubject. 

What I shall say is largely personal and you must not look upon me asrepresenting anybody or anything. I may even fail to agree with some ofthe instruction that you have received in this interesting and valuablecourse. But I do speak, of course, as one who loves our church and as aloyal and I hope a thoughtful layman. 

First, what is belief? We surely give the word a wide range of values. Aman says that he believes in his own existence, which the philosopherDescartes said was the most sure thing in the world--"_Cogito, ergo sum_. "He also says that he believes it will rain to-morrow. What can there be incommon between these two acts of faith? Between a certainty and a fiftyper cent chance, or less? This--that a man is always willing to act on hisbeliefs; if not, they are not beliefs within the meaning of this address. If you believe it will rain, you take an umbrella. Your doing so is quiteindependent of the grounds for your belief. There may really be verylittle chance of its raining; but it is your belief that causes youraction, no matter whether it is justified or not. You could not act moredecisively if you were acting on the certainty of your own existence. Itis this willingness to act that unifies our beliefs--that gives themvalue. If I heard a man declare his belief that a fierce wild animal wason his track, and if I then saw him calmly lie down and go to sleep on thetrail, I should know that he was either insane or a liar. 

I have intimated above that belief may or may not be based on mathematicalcertainty. Fill up a basket with black and white pebbles and then draw outone. Let us create a situation that shall make it imperative for a personto declare whether a black or a white pebble will be drawn. For instance, suppose the event to be controlled by an oriental despot who has givenorders to strike off the man's head if he announces the wrong color. Ofcourse, if he has seen that only white pebbles went into the basket hesays boldly "White. " That is certainty. But suppose he saw one blackpebble in the mass. Does he any the less say "White"? That one blackpebble represents a tiny doubt; does it affect the direction of hisenforced action? Suppose there were two black pebbles; or a handful. Suppose nearly half the pebbles were black? Would that make the slightestdifference about what he would do? If you judge a man's belief by what hedoes, as I think you should do, that belief may admit of a good deal ofdoubt before it is nullified. Are your beliefs all based on mathematicalcertainties? I hope not; for then they must be few indeed. 

That many of our fellow men have a wrong conception of belief is a verysad fact. The idea that it must be based on a mathematical demonstrationof certainty, or even that it must be free from doubt is surely notChristian. Our prayers and our hymns are full of the contrary. We arebeset not only by "fightings" but by "fears"--"within; without;" by "manya conflict, many a doubt"; we pray to be delivered from this same doubt. The whole body of Christian doctrine is permeated with the idea that thetrue believer is likely to be beset by doubts of all kinds, and that it ishis duty, despite all this, to believe. 

And yet there are many who will not call themselves Christians so long asthey can not construct a rigid demonstration of every Christian doctrine. There are many thoughtful men who call themselves Agnostics just becausethey can not be mathematically sure of religious truth. Some of these menare better Christians than many that are so named. That they hold alooffrom Christian fellowship is due to their mistaken notion of the nature ofbelief. The more is the pity. Now let us go back for a moment to ourbasket of pebbles. We have seen that the action of the guesser is based tosome extent on his knowledge of the contents of the basket. In otherwords, he has grounds for the belief by which his act is conditioned. Persons may act without grounds; it may be necessary for them so to do. Even in this case there may be a sort of blind substitute for belief. Aman, pursued by a bear, comes to a fork in the road. He knows nothingabout either branch; one may lead to safety and one to a jungle. But hehas to choose, and choose at once; and his choice represents his bid forsafety. There is plenty of action of this sort in the world; if we wouldavoid the necessity for it we must do a little preliminary investigation;and if we can not find definitely where the roads lead, we may at leasthit upon some idea of which is the safest. 

But with all our investigation we shall find that we must rely in the endon our trust in some person; either ourselves or someone else. Even thecertainty of the mathematical formula depends on our confidence in thesanity of our own mental processes. The man who sees the basket filledwith white pebbles must trust the accuracy of his eyesight. If he reliesfor his information on what someone else told him, he must trust not onlythat other's eyesight, but his memory, his veracity, his friendliness. Andyet one may be far safer in trusting another than in relying on his ownunaided powers. _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_, says the old Latin. "Theworld's judgment is safe. " We have learned to modify this, for we haveseen world judgments that are manifestly incorrect. The world thought theearth was flat. It thought there were witches, and it burned them. Hereindividuals simply followed one another like sheep; and all, like sheep, went astray. But where there is a real, independent judgment on the partof each member of a group, and all agree, that is better proof of itscorrectness than most individual investigations could furnish. My watch, of the best make and carefully regulated, indicates five o'clock, but if Imeet five friends, each of whom tells me, independently, that it is six, Iconclude that my watch is wrong. There was never a more careful scientificinvestigation than that by which a French physicist thought he hadestablished the existence of what he called the "N ray"--examined itsproperties and measured its constants. He read paper after paper beforelearned bodies as his research progressed. He challenged the interest ofhis brother scientists on three continents. And yet he was entirely wrong:there never was any "N ray. " The man had deceived himself. The failure ofhundreds to see as he did weighed more than his positive testimony that hesaw what he thought he saw. Here as elsewhere our view of what may be thetruth is based on trust. If you trust the French physicist, you will stillbelieve in the "N ray. " Creeds we are told, are outworn, and yet we areconfronted, from birth to death, with situations that imperiously requireaction of some sort. Every act that responds must be based on belief ofsome kind. Creeds are only expressions of belief. The kind of Creed that_is_ outworn (and this is doubtless what intelligent persons mean whenthey make this statement) is the parrot creed, the form of words withoutmeaning, the statement of belief without any grounds behind it or anyaction in front of it. For this the modern churchman has no use. 

And if he desires to avoid the parrot creed, he must surely inform himselfregarding the meaning of its articles and the grounds on which they areheld. More; he must satisfy himself of the particular meaning that theyhave for him and the personal grounds on which he is to hold them. This isthe reason why such a course as that which you complete to-night isnecessary and valuable. I have heard instruction of this kind deprecatedas likely to bring disturbing elements into the mind. One may doubtlesschange from belief to skepticism by too much searching. It used to be astanding joke in Yale College, when I was a student there, that awell-known professor reputed to be an Atheist, had been perfectly orthodoxuntil he had heard President Porter's lectures on the "Evidences ofChristianity. " But seriously, this objection is but another phase of thefallacy at which we have already glanced--that doubts are fatal to belief. I am certain that the professor in question might have examined in detailevery one of President Porter's "Evidences, " and found them wanting, onlyto discover clearer and stronger grounds of belief elsewhere--in his mereconfidence in others, perhaps. Or he might have turned pragmatist andbelieved in Christianity because it "worked"--a valid reason in this casedoubtless, but not always to be depended on; because the Father of Liessometimes makes things "work" himself--at least temporarily. 

But if examining into the grounds of his belief makes a man honestly giveup that belief, then I bid him God-speed. I may weep for him, but I cannothelp believing that he stands better with his Maker for being honest withhimself than if he had gone on with his parrot belief that meantabsolutely nothing. I can not feel that the Aztecs who were baptized bythe followers of Cortes were any more believers in Christianity after theceremony than they were before. It seems to me, however that a Christian, examining faithfully the grounds of his belief, will usually have thatbelief strengthened, and that a churchman, examining the doctrines of thechurch will be similarly upheld. 

Not that church instruction should be one-sided. The teaching that tendsto make us believe that every intelligent man thinks as we do reactsagainst itself. It is like the unfortunate temperance teaching thatrepresents the liking for wine as always acquired. When the pupil comes totaste wine and finds that he likes it at once, he concludes that the wholebody of instruction in the physiology of alcohol is false and actsaccordingly. When a boy is taught that there is nothing of value beyondhis own church, or nothing of value outside of Christianity, he will thinkless of his church, and less of Christianity when he finds intelligent, upright, lovable outsiders. I look back with horror on some of the books, piously prepared under the auspices of the S. P. C. K. In London, that I usedto take home from Sunday School. In them we were told that a good manoutside the church was worse than a bad man in it. If that was not theteaching in the book, it was at least the form in which it took lodgmentin my boyish brain. Thank God it never found permanent foothold there. Instead, I hold in my memory the Eastern story of God's rebuke to Abrahamwhen he expelled the Fire Worshipper from his tent. "Could you not bearwith him for one hour? Lo! I have borne with him these forty years!"

I have always thought that a knowledge of what our neighbors believe is anexcellent balance-wheel to our own beliefs and that our own beliefs, sobalanced, will be saner and more restrained. It would be well, I think, ifwe could have a survey of the world's religions, setting down in parallelcolumns all the faiths of mankind. If this is too great a task we mightbegin with a survey of Christianity, set down in the same way. I believethat the results of such a survey might surprise us, showing, as I thinkit would do, the many fundamentals that we hold in common and the trivialnature of some of the barriers that appear to separate us. 

In your course, just completed, you have had such a survey, I doubt not, of the beliefs of our own beloved church. Where her divines have differed, you have had the varying opinions spread before you. You have not beentold that the mind of every churchman has always been a replica of themind of every other churchman. Personally, I feel grateful that this hasnot been the case. As I say my creed and begin "I believe in God, theFather Almighty, " I realize that the aspect of even such a basic belief asthis, is the same in no two minds; that it shifts from land to land andfrom age to age. I know that God, as he is, is past human knowledge andthat until we see Him face to face we can not all mean just the same thingwhen we repeat this article of belief. But I realize also that this is notdue to the mutability of the Almighty but to man's variability. The Godsof St. Jerome, of Thomas Carlyle and of William James are different; butthat is because these men had different types of minds. Behind their humanideas stands God himself--"the same yesterday, to-day and forever. " So wemay go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, thebeliefs of the church. Everywhere we see the evidences of the working, upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond fullhuman knowledge--

 "That one far-off divine event Toward which the Whole Creation moves. "

We have a wonderful church, my friends. It is a church to live with; achurch to be proud of. Those who miss what we are privileged to enjoy aremissing something from the fulness of life. We have not broken with thehistoric continuity of the Christian faith: there is no chasm, filled withwreckage, between us and the fathers of the church. Above all we haveenshrined our beliefs in a marvellous liturgy, which is ever old and evernew, and which had the good fortune to be put into English at a day whenthe force of expression in our Mother tongue was peculiarly virile, yetpeculiarly lovely. I know of nothing in the whole range of Englishliterature that will compare with the collects as contained in our Book ofCommon Prayer, for beauty, for form, for condensation and for force. Theyare a string of pearls. And indeed, what I have said of them applies tothe whole book. When I see Committees of well-meaning divines trying totamper with it, I shudder as I might if I witnessed the attempt of a guildof modern sculptors to improve the Venus of Milo by chipping off a bithere and adding something there. Good reasons exist for changes, doubtless; but I feel that we have here a work of art, of divine art; andart is one of God's ways of reaching the human heart. We are proud that wehave not discarded it from our church buildings, from our altars, from themusic of our choirs. Let us treat tenderly our great book of CommonPrayer, like that other great masterpiece of divine literary art, the KingJames version of the Bible. There are plenty of better translations; thereis not one that has the same magic of words to fire the imagination andmelt the heart. 

These are all trite things to say to churchmen: I have tried, on occasion, to say them to non-churchmen, but they do not seem to respond. There arethose who rejoice in their break with historic continuity, who look upon awritten form of service with horror. It is well, as I have said, for us torealize that our friends hold these opinions. One can not strengthen hismuscles in a tug of war unless some one is pulling the other way. Thesavor of religion, like that of life itself, is in its contrasts. I thankGod that we have them even within our own Communion. We are high-churchand low-church and broad-church. We burn incense and we wear Geneva gowns. This diversity is not to be condemned. What is to be deprecated is thefeeling among some of us that the diversity should give place touniformity--to uniformity of their own kind, of course. To me, this wouldbe a calamity. Let us continue to make room in our church forindividuality. God never intended men to be pressed down in one mold ofsameness. In the last analysis, each of us has his own religious beliefs. The doctrines of our church, or of any church are but a composite portraitof these beliefs. But when one takes such a portrait throughout all landsand in all time, and the features keep true, one can not help regardingthem as the divine lineaments. 

This is how I would have you regard the beliefs of our church, as you havestudied them throughout this course--as our particular compositephotograph of the face of God, as He has impressed it on the hearts andminds of each one of us. I commend this view to those who have noreverence for beliefs, particularly when they are formulated as creeds. These persons mean that they have no regard for group beliefs but only forthose of the individual. Each has his own beliefs, and he must haveconfidence in them, for they are the grounds on which he acts, if he is anormal man. Even the faith of an Agnostic is based on a very positivebelief. As for me, I feel that the churchman goes one step beyond him: heeven doubts Doubt. Said Socrates: "I know nothing except this one thing, that I know nothing. The rest of you are ignorant even of this. " Socrateswas a great man. If he had been greater still, he might have saidsomething like this: "I freely acknowledge that a mathematical formula cannot satisfy all the cases that we discuss. But neither can it be statedmathematically that they are all unknowable. I am not even sure that Iknow nothing. " Surely, under these circumstances, we may give over lookingfor mathematical demonstrations and believe a few things on our ownaccount--that our children love us--that our eyes do not deceive us; thatthe soul lives on; that God rules all. We may put our faith in what ourown church teaches us, even as a child trusts his father though he can notconstruct a single syllogism that will increase that trust. 

This does not mean that we shall not benefit by examining the articles ofour faith; by learning what they are, what they mean and what others havethought of them. The churchman must combine, in his mental habits, allthat is best of the Conservative and the Radical. While holding fast thatwhich is good he must keep an open mind toward every change that may serveto bring him nearer to the truth or give him a clearer vision of it. 

How we can insure this better than by such an institution as the ChurchSchool for Religious Instruction I am sure I do not see. May God guide itand aid it in its work!

INDEX

Abraham, Story of, 335

Action, test of belief, 332

Ade, George, 110, 170; fables in picture plays, 319

Adults and children, compared, 14

Advertisement of ideas, 127

Aldrich, T. B. , 322

Alger, Horatio, 16, 174

America, Fluid customs in, 224

"America", hymn, 191

American Academy of Sciences, 57

American ancestry, 179; architecture, 218; art, 217; music, 218; philosophy, 220; religion, 219; thought, tendencies of, 213

American Association for the Advancement of Science, 50

American Library Association, 51

American Library Institute, 52

American readers, 42

Americanization, 17, 73

Americanization of England, 225

Ancestry, American, 179

Anglo-Saxon ancestry, 181

Architecture, American, 218

Archives, family, 184

Army, international, 159

Art, American, 217; effect of, 163

Art, Early forms of, 37

Association, value of, 45

Atoms of energy and action, 122

Attractiveness a selective feature, 26

Austen, Jane, 176

Author, Function of, 67

Authors Club, N. Y. , 51

Auto-suggestion in drugs, 233

Aviation, Newcomb's opinion of, 86

Belief, What is?, 339

Bennett, Arnold, 175

Bible, King James Version, 337

Birth of a nation; picture play, 322

Book-stores, disappearance of, 238

Books in selective education, 27

"Book-Taught Bilkins", 89, 98

Book-titles, Possessive case in, 19

Boston tea-party, 183

Branch libraries, Reasons given for using, 11

British Association, 307

Brooklyn Public Library, 4

Brown, Susannah H. , who was she? 281

Browsing, 27; uses of, 104

Bryce, James, quoted, 216

Buildings, Monumental, 141

Bulwer-Lytton, E. G. E. L. , 86

Burbank, Luther, 24

Cabiria; motion picture play, 319, 322

Captions in motion pictures, 318

Carnegie, Andrew, 77

Carnegie Institution, 85, 306

Cartoonist, Anecdote of, 294

Centre, What is a?, 145

Centralized associations, 58

Certainty and belief, 330

Chaucer, 293

Chautauqua, 265

Chemistry, New drugs from, 232

Chicago Evening Post, quoted, 109

Chicago, Field houses in, 148

Chicago Women's Club, Paper before, 197

Children's editions, 6; rooms, 31

Christian Science and drugs, 233

Christianity, 331

Christmas book shows, 170

Church School of religious instruction, 329

Church, Use of symbols by, 188

Churches of Christ in America, Federation of, 220

Circulation by volumes, 6; publicity value of, 142; tables, 7, 8

Circulation, Publicity, 142

Civil Engineers, Society of, 52

Civil War, Notions of, 180

Classroom libraries, 29

Clergy, Slight influence of, 13

"Close-ups" in motion pictures, 317

Clubs that meet in libraries, 148

Clubwomen's reading, 259

Colloquial speech, 92

Color-photography in motion pictures, 327

Combat, Settlement by, 158

Commercial travellers, 198

Commission government, 216

Constitution, United States, 50, 214; amendment of, 226

Continuum, 116

Cook, Dr. Frederick, 95

Copyright conference, 53

Courses of reading, 268

Court, International, 159

Creeds, Uses of, 333

Crowd-psychology on a ferry, 247

Dante, 46

D'Annunzio, G. , 322

Delivery stations in drug stores, 241

Democracy a result, 72; and ancestry, 186; and despotism, 213; conditions of, 209

Department stores, 238

Despotism and democracy, 213

Dickens, pathos of, 175

Disarmament, 161

Discontinuity of the universe, 124

Distribution of books, 67, 129

Distributor, Library as a, 198

Divorce, Freedom of, 217

Don Quixote, Heine on, 173

Drug-addiction, 234

Drugs and the man, 229

Eaton, Walter Pritchard, quoted, 316

Eclecticism in America, 213

Economic advertising, 130

Economic writings of Newcomb, 86

Education, American, 218; in recreation, 100; modern methods of, 63; of the community, 243; of the sexes, 273; post-scholastic, 30; selective, 23, 65; through books, 90

Efficiency in association, 48; What is? 257

Elizabethan drama, 323

Energetics, Theory of, 114

Energy, Atomic theories of, 113

England an elective monarchy. 214; rigid customs in, 224; source consciousness in, 182

Ephemeral, Meaning of, 36

Episcopalians, 220

Eyes, injured by small type, 302

Fairy tales, 75

Falsity in books, 39

Feminist movement, 267

Flag, what it stands for, 187

Fiction, 39; interest in, 137; intoxication by, 40, 100; uses of, 35

Fluids, Mixture of, 118

Force symbolized by flag, 194

Ford, Henry, 237

Freedom, What is? 192

Gallicism in book-titles, 22

Gary system, 246

Genealogy, American, 179

Gibbs, J. Willard, quoted, 118

Good-will, Influence of, 17

Government, Federal, 213

Gravitation, Law of, 83

Gray's Elegy, 111

Greek tragedy, 324

Group-action, 45; on a ferry, 247

Hall, G. Stanley, quoted, 253

Harvard Classics, 109

Heine, Heinrich, quoted, 173

Henry, Joseph, 80

Heredity, and memory, 73; History and, 179

Hertzian waves, 121

Hilgard, Julius, 80

Hill, G. W. , 84

Holmes, Mary J. , 104

Homer, Methods of, 198

Honesty, Lack of, 32

Huey, Book by, 305

Hunt, Leigh, 109

Huret, Jules, 41

Identity, Meaning of, 114

Impeachment, 214

Indicator, in English libraries, 225

Indifference to books, 133

Information in books, 94

Inspiration from books, 101

Intemperance in reading, 40, 100

Interest, Importance of, 287, 289; Necessity of, 5, 137

International agreements in science, 85

Internationalism, 159

Intoxication by fiction, 40, 100

Ivanhoe, 175

James, William, 138; founder of pragmatism, 221; quoted, 287

Keith, Cleveland, 84

Kent, William, quoted, 229

Kepler, quoted, 177

Kinemacolor process, 327

Kinetic theory, 120

Koopman, H. L. , 308

Lagrange, 114

Languages, written and spoken, 90

Large type, Books in, 301

Law, Enforcement of, 158

Le Bon, Gustave, 45

Lee, Gerald Stanley, 77

Legibility of type, 306

Libbey, Laura Jean, 41, 104

Libraries, Economic features of, 67

Library associations. 49; Non-partisanship of, 70, 96, 152; Private basis of, 169

Lindsay, Vachell, 321

Lines, Length of on printed page, 309

Liouville's theorem, 123

Lippmann, Walter, quoted, 216, 228

Literature an art, 165; evaluation of, 95; static and dynamic, 35

Los Angeles Public Library, 96

Lower-case letters. 307

Loyalists, United Empire, 180

Lummis, Chas. F. , 96

Lunar theory, 84

Magazines, Support of, 68

Magical remedies, 233

Magnet, Definition of, 87

Make-up in motion pictures, 317

Malemployment, 229

Maxwell Jas. Clerk, 115

Mayflower, The, 183

Medical Record, Strasburg, 305

Meetings in libraries, 147

Memory, Latent, 74

Meredith, Geo. , 110

Mexican commission, 194

Military associations, 48

Mill, John Stuart, 243, 244

Mind, Male and female types, 272

Moderation, Lack of in America, 235

Mohammedanism, 219

Molecular theory, 115

Moon's motion, 84

Morals, Eclecticism in, 216

Morgan, J. P. , 169

Motives of library users, 11

Moving pictures, 313

Municipal ownership and operation, 154

Music, American, 218

N-ray, 333

Narrative, earliest literary form, 37

National Academy of Fine Arts, 57

National Academy of Science, 52

National Education Association, 50; Address before, 145

Nautical Almanac, 80

New country, What is? 182

New England Society, 179

New York, Free Circulating Library, 19

New York, Library support in, 200; West side readers, 42

New York Public Library, 11, 30, 220

Newcomb, Simon, Sketch of, 79

Newspapers, 36

Newton, Isaac, 83

Non-partisanship of library, 250

Norris, Frank, 322

Omar Khayyam, 108

Open shelves, 104; Origin of, 225

Optic, Oliver, 174

Ostwald, Wilhelm, 114

Pacifism, 157

Pageant of St. Louis, 188

Pantomime in the motion picture, 320

Papers, Ready-made, for clubs, 270; scientific, 275

Pater, Walter, 168

Paulist fathers, 220

Pauperization, intellectual, 68

Pendleton, A. M. , quoted, 140

Perry, Bliss, quoted, 211

Pharmacy, School of, address to, 229

Philadelphia Free Library, Address at, 67

Philosophy, an interesting subject, 133, 138; in America, 220

Phonograph, Uses of, 94

Physics made interesting, 138

Pickford, Mary, 247, 317

Planck, Max, 113, 120

Planets, Orbits of, 83

Players' Club, N. Y. , 51

Pocahontas, 183

Poincaré, Henri, 113, 120

"Poison labels" for books, 96

Porter, Noah, 334

Posse, International, 159

Possessive case, Use of, 19

Pragmatism in America, 221

Prayer Book as literature, 337

Prescott, William H. , 95

Press, Slight influence of, 13

Pride, Personal and group, 185

Princeton University, 219

Printing Art, magazine, 308

Programitis, club disease, 286

Programmes, Club, 268, 280, 295

Public as library owners, 205

Public Library, 169; eclecticism of, 221; people's share in, 197

Publicity, Library, 140

Publisher, Function of, 67

Puritanism, 219

Quanta, 121; hypothesis of, 113

Race-record, Library as a, 74

Radio-activity, 231

Rayleigh's Law, 120

Readers, Do they read? 3

Reading, mechanism of, 91; skill in, 135

Realism in education, 246; in motion pictures, 314

Recall, earliest form of, 213

Records, varieties of, 94

Recreation through books, 99

Religion in America, 219

Renewal, Preservation by, 97

Repetition a test of art, 166

Reprinting, Use of, 98

Re-reading, Art of, 163

Residual personality, 290

Resonators, 121

Revolution, American, notions of, 180; versus evolution, 279

Revue Scientifique, 113

Roethlin, Barbara E. , 306

Roman Catholic Church, 220

Roman viewpoint in history, 181

Rome, decadence of, 227

Rousiers, Paul de. , quoted, 55, 56, 57

St. Louis Academy of Science, paper before, 113

St. Louis, library tax in, 200

St. Louis Public Library, 140, 254, 302; meetings in, 150

Sampling books, 110

Scenery in motion pictures, 317; in Elizabethan drama, 323; made of motion pictures, 327

School libraries, 29

School, Non-partisanship of, 70; Community use of, 155

Schoolmen of N. Y. , Paper before, 23

Scientific societies, 52

"See America First" movement, 191

Selection In nature, 23; mechanical, 47

Selective education, 65

Sex in library use, 15

Sexes, differences of, 272

Shakespeare, 178; changes in, 293; rank of, 168; unavailable for stage, 323

Shaw, Edw. R. , 304

Social Centre movement, 145

Society for Psychical Research, 82

Society of Illuminating Engineers, 57

Socrates, quoted, 338

Sorolla, 164

Southern views of Civil War, 180

Spelling reform, 93

Staginess of the theatre, 315

Standard Dictionary, 87

Standards in literature, 36

Statistics of reading, actual, 4

Story-telling, 37; extraordinary, 282

Structure of energy, 118

Superficiality, meaning of, 105; 269

Swift, Dean, 208

Symbols, Use of, 188

Taste, literary, 171; origin of, 4

Tax, library, 200

Teacher, influence of, 13, 243

Text-books, Defects of, 270

Therapeutics, Changes in, 230

Tocqueville, de. , quoted, 56

Toronto, University of, 220

Trade-literature, 98

Tradition, Uses of, 93

Travel, Foreign, in United States, 41

Trollope, Anthony, 176

Tutorial system, 219

Tyndall, John, 138

Type sizes, Standardization of, 304

Un-American, what is? 226

Unfitness, Elimination of, 24

Union, symbolized by flag, 189

Unity of place on the stage, 324

Universal City, 317

Value, Structure of, 119

Van Dyke, Henry, quoted, 193

Verne, Jules, 86

Violence, systematization of, 157

Vision, Conservation of, 305

Volumes, Statistics by, 4

Walton, Isaac, 165

War, European, 209, 249; status of, 158

Wesley, John, 46

West, source-consciousness of, 182

White, Gilbert, 165

Wien, Wilhelm, 122

Women's Clubs, 210; reading of, 259

Woodbury, George E. , quoted, 219