To make good books available to all children of a community.
To train boys and girls to use with discrimination the adult
library.
To reinforce and supplement the class work of the city schools
(public, private, parochial and "Sunday" schools).
To cooperate with institutions for civic and social betterment,
such as playgrounds, settlements, missions, boys' and girls'
clubs; and with commercial institutions employing boys and girls,
such as factories, postoffice special delivery division,
telegraph and telephone agencies and department stores.
And first and last to build character and develop literary taste
through the medium of books and the influence of the children's
librarian.
Pursuing these purposes, endeavoring to meet these tests. library
work with children will make for better citizenship. It will take
account not only of the children of the poor, but of the children
of the well-to-do, who may need that influence even more. In the
cities, which now overshadow our national life, there are no
longer homes; there are flats, where the boys and girls are
tolerated--perhaps.
"Our problem is not the bad boy, but rather the modern city,"
says Prof. Allen Hoben. "The normal boy has come honestly by his
love of adventure, his motor propensities and his gang instincts.
It is when you take this healthy biological product and set him
down in the midst of city restrictions that serious trouble
ensues. For the city has been built for economic convenience, and
with little thought for human welfare. Industrial aim is
evidenced to every sense. You smell industrialism in the far-
reaching odors of the stockyards. You hear it in the roar of the
elevated hard by the windows of the poor. You see it in a water
front that people cannot use, and you touch it in the fleck of
soot that is usually on your nose. The proof of industrial
aggression ceases to be humorous, however, when it shows itself
in the small living quarters of many a city flat where boys are
supposed to find the equivalent of the old-time house.
Constituted as he is, the boy cannot but be a nuisance in the
flat community. And because the flat dweller moves frequently, he
will be without those real neighbors of long standing whose
leniency formerly robbed the law of its victims. Furthermore, he
has no particular quarters of his own where he may satisfy his
sense of proprietorship and save up the numerous things he
collects with a view to using them in construction. The flat
dwellers will not permit the noise or litter incident to such
building as a boy likes; and he has little if any part in the
labor of conducting the house. He loses dignity as a helpful and
necessary member of the family, he loses that loyalty which
attaches to the old familiar places of boyhood experience and
strengthens many a man to-day, making him more kind and
consistent in his living by virtue of homestead memories."
So the boy is driven to the street as his domain. It is his
playground. And here he encounters the policeman. Of 717 children
arrested in one month in New York City, more than half were
arrested for playing games. Parenthetically, the fact may be
quoted that in this children's chief playground in a period of
ten months 67 children were killed and 196 injured.
Unerringly, these facts point to a union of social forces--the
children's library and the children's playground, a realization
of that clear comprehension which the ancient Greeks had of the
unity between the body and the mind. Quoting Plato: "If children
are trained to submit to laws in their plays' the love of law
enters their souls with the music accompanying their games, never
leaves them, and helps them in their development."
Having in thought physical recreation as a stimulus to mental
development, in combination bringing home the joyousness of life,
an ideal union of forces is being effected in some of the larger
cities. In some places, the movement has assumed but an initial
stage--a bit of tent shelter for distribution of books to
children gathered at the sand pile. In some instances co-
operation has joined the work of park breathing centers and
library organizations. This has reached completed form in the
placement of branch libraries as part of the park equipment,
either quarters within a general building, or a separate little
building adjacent to or on the athletic field.
But whether in place of high or low degree; whether in rented
store or memorial building of monumental type; whether in the
rooms of a school building or a corner in a factory; whether by
this method or by that, the children's librarian employs the
printed page to serve as instrument to these ends:
The building of character, making for the best in citizenship.
The enlargement of narrow lives, bringing the joy and savour and
beauty of life to the individual.
The opening of opportunity to all alike, which is the essence of
democracy.
And in, the doing, an incidental and a great contribution is made
to society as a whole. For, as the story hour unfolds a new world
to the listener whose life has been bounded by a litter- covered
alley and three bare walls, or whose look into the outside world
has been perhaps a roof of tar and gravel and a yawning chasm
beyond, so the development of the imagination through the right
sort of books shall make possible the fullest development of the
individual boy and girl. In many a life there has been a supreme
moment when some circumstance, some stimulus has changed that
life for good or ill. For want of that stimulus, the dormant
power of many a man has gone to waste. Half the derelicts of
humanity who are but outcasts of the night had in them the making
of good men--perhaps some of them of great men, in science or in
art. There is no waste that is greater than lost opportunity;
there is no loss so great as undiscovered resource. Speaking of
imagination in work, Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie points out that:
"So long as the uses of the imagination in creative work are so
little comprehended by the great majority of men, it can hardly
be expected that its practical uses will be understood. There is
a general if somewhat vague recognition of the force and beauty
of its achievements as illustrated in the work of Dante, Raphael,
Rembrandt and Wagner; but very few people perceive the play of
this supreme architectural and structural faculty in the great
works of engineering, or in the sublime guesses at truth which
science sometimes makes when she comes to the end of the solid
road of fact along which she has traveled. The scientist the
engineer, the constructive man in every department of work uses
the imagination quite as much as the artist; for the imagination
is not a decorator and embellisher, as so many appear to think;
it is a creator and constructor. Wherever work is done on great
lines or life is lived in field of constant fertility, the
imagination is always the central and shaping power."
I would have liked in this over-lengthy, but yet fragmentary
survey of the field from the viewpoint of the library, to say
something of the mistakes which have perhaps been made, and which
may still be made unguardedly by reason of over-zeal whereby the
relationship of the work to other things may be ignored or
misunderstood; of the danger that over-strong consciousness as to
possession of high ideals may dictate too urgent use of books
that may have literary style, but do not reach the heart of the
boy--driving him to the comic supplement and to the dregs of
print for his reading hours. These, and other comments must be
left for another occasion.
I would also have liked to say something of the history of work
with children in libraries, but Miss Josephine Rathbone has told
the story fully and well. In that history, when it shall be
written a quarter century hence, it will be fitting to give full
meed of honor to Samuel Sweet Greene, Edwin H. Anderson, Mrs. H.
L. Elmendorf, Miss Frances J. Olcott, Miss Linda A. Eastman and
some of the other splendid women of the profession whose presence
here precludes the mention of their names.
So, too, I would have liked to give the result, statistically, of
an inquiry, which the helpful kindness of Miss Faith E. Smith,
chairman of this section, has enabled me to make. It must suffice
here to limit the statement to a brief summary that shows less
what has been accomplished than what remains to be attempted:
There are in the United States to-day approximately 1,500 public
libraries containing each more than 5,000 volumes. The number
reporting children's work is 525, with a total of 676 rooms
having an aggregate seating capacity of 21,821, and an available
combined supply of 1,771,161 volumes on open shelves. The number
of libraries in which story hours are held is 152, and 304 report
work with schools. Of course, this work is pitifully meager as to
many libraries. The number of children who come more or less
under the direct influence of children's librarians is generously
estimated as 1,035,195 (103 libraries, including all the large
systems reporting). There are in the United States of children
from 6 to 16 years of age, approximately thirty-three millions.
Behind the work of the children's librarians there is a fine
spirit of optimism--not blind to difficulties, but courageous,
ardent and hopeful.
Disregarding ridicule, which is but a cheap substitute for wit;
regardful of criticism, which is often provocative or promotive
of improvement, inspired with the dignity of their high calling,
and with a fine vision that projects itself into the future, the
librarians engaged in the work with children willingly give
thereto the finest and the best of personality that they possess.
Descriptive of their spirit, we may aptly paraphrase the words of
a great humanitarian of our own generation:
"Some there are, the builders of humanity's temples, who are
laboring to give a vast heritage to the children of all the
world. They build patiently, for they have faith in their work.
"And this is their faith--that the power of the world springs
from the common labor and strife and conquest of the countless
age of human life and struggle; that not for a few was that labor
and that struggle, but for all. And the common labor of the race
for the common good and the common joy will bring that fulness of
life which sordid greed and blighting ignorance would make
impossible."
And you have the faith of the builders.