Delivered by Frederick M. Crunden before the Library Section
of the International Congress of Arts and Science, held in
connection with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St.
Louis in 1904, closes with a summary of the public library's
functions that remains measurably true to-day, although, of
course, it could now be somewhat expanded.
A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in Vol. I.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition is an epitome of the life and activity
of the world--from the naked Negrito to the grande dame with her
elaborate Paris costume, from the rude wigwam of the red Indian to the
World's Fair palace filled with the finest furniture, rugs and
tapestries, sculpture and painting, and decorations that the highest
taste and finest technique can produce--from the monotonous din of the
savage tom-tom to the uplifting and enthralling strains of a great
symphony orchestra--from fire by friction, the first step of man beyond
the beast, to the grand electric illumination that makes of these
grounds and buildings the most beautiful art-created spectacle that ever
met the human eye. And to all this magnificent appeal to the senses are
superadded the marvels of modern science and its applications--the
wonders of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope, the
telegraph, in its latest wireless extension, the electric motor and
electric light, the telephone and the phonograph, the Roentgen ray and
the new-found radium.
And now after this vision of wondrous beauty, this triumph of the grand
arts of architecture and sculpture and landscape--of all the arts, fine
and useful--has for six months enraptured the senses of people from all
quarters of the globe, the learned men of the world have gathered here
to set forth and discuss the fundamental principals that underlie the
sciences, their correlations and the methods of their application to the
arts of life--to summarize the progress of the past, to discuss the
condition of the present and attempt, perhaps, a forecast of the future.
In the scheme of classification, our subject appears in the last
department that concerns itself with man's purely mundane affairs, and
is the last section in that department. It thus appears properly as a
climax and summary of the arts and sciences intelligible to man in his
present stage of existence; and if the problem of the future life is
ever solved this side of the grave, the knowledge conserved and
disseminated by the library will be the starting-point and the
inspiration of the advance, as it has been of all progress since the art
of written speech was invented. "The library is the reservoir of the
common social life of the race. It is at once the accumulator and the
transmitter of social energy." Without the library the highest social
culture is impossible; and a most moderate degree could be achieved by
very few.
Under the main division, "Social Culture," the library is one of the
five sections in the Department of Education. In education are summed up
all the achievements of the past and the possibilities of the future. In
the words of Wendell Phillips, "Education is the one thing worthy the
deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man." "Education," exclaims
Mazzini, "and my whole doctrine is included and summed up in this grand
word." It is practically a truism that Jules Simon utters when he says
"Le peuple qui a les meilleures écoles est le premier peuple; s'il ne
l'est pas aujourd'hui il le sera demain."
Under this Department of Education, with its grades, the School, the
College and the University, the Library is assigned the last section. It
belongs there in chronological order of development as an active factor
in popular instruction and enlightenment; and, furthermore, the
presentation of its claims and functions comes naturally after those of
the other factors in education, because it is an essential coadjutor and
supplement to each and all. It is a summary and a climax. There have
always been libraries, and they have always been a factor in education;
but the public, free, tax-supported library is but just half a century
old, and could hardly be considered out of the long clothes of infancy
till the year 1876; while its general acceptance as an essential
supplement to the public school and a co-ordinate factor with the
college and university may be considered the accomplishment of the last
decade. There are still teachers who look on general reading as an
interference with school work and an extra burden on their shoulders.
We start, then, with the axiomatic proposition that all human progress
depends on education; and no elaborate demonstration is necessary to
show that the library is an essential factor in every grade of
education.
Higher education, certainly, cannot dispense with the library. The
well-known dictum of Carlyle, "The true university of modern times is a
collection of books," was accepted as a striking statement of a man with
rhetorical habit, without, perhaps, a realization of its full
significance. It has been recently expanded into a more express and
specific tribute to the importance of the library in university
education. In an address delivered in St. Louis and afterwards published
in the _North American Review_, President Harper said:
"The place occupied by libraries and laboratories in the educational
work of to-day, as compared with that of the past, is one of commanding
importance. Indeed, the library and the laboratory have already
practically revolutionized the methods of higher education. In the
really modern institution, the chief building is the library. It is the
center of institutional activity.... That factor of college work, the
library, fifty years ago almost unknown, to-day already the center of
the institution's intellectual activity, half a century hence, with its
sister, the laboratory, almost equally unknown fifty years ago, will
have absorbed all else and will have become the institution itself."
As to the value of the library in elementary education Doctor Harris
says:
"What there is good in our American system points towards the
preparation of the pupil for the independent study of the book by
himself. It points towards acquiring the ability of self-education by
means of the library."
I might quote similar utterances from many other eminent educators as to
the value--the necessity--of the library in early education; but I can
think of no stronger summing-up of the subject, nor from higher
authority, than this statement from President Eliot:
"From the total training during childhood there should result in the
child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should direct
and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling which
results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or
eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main end of
elementary education; and that schooling which does not result in
implanting this permanent taste has failed.... The uplifting of the
democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the taste for
good reading."
To persons who have given little thought to educational questions these
utterances will have the weight that attaches to the highest authority;
but we need no university president or national commissioner to tell us
these facts. We have learned them from our own experience; and,
enlightened as we now are, it seems to us strange that question could
ever have been raised as to the essential character of the library in
elementary education. Yet there are some of us, I am sure, who can
recall painful consequences from putting into practice an educational
theory not generally accepted by the pedagogues of our childhood days.
We know that higher education is impossible without a library, for the
library is the storehouse of the world's knowledge, the record of
humanity's achievements, the history of mankind's trials and sorrows and
sufferings, of its victories and defeats and of its gradual progress
upwards in spite of frequent fluctuation and failure. In this chronicle
of the past lie lessons for the present and the future; from the lives
of storied heroes comes the inspiration that leads the race onward and
upward. A university without a library would of necessity have a very
small and weak faculty--only the few professors who could be induced to
go where the most important instrumentality of their work was lacking:
the university that has an adequate library includes in its faculty the
professors of all other universities and all the great teachers of all
countries and ages.
But is it worth while to consider a university without a library? Can
there be such an institution?
In higher education, then, the library is a necessity. In elementary
and secondary education it is no less essential, if the most is to be
made of the few years that the average child spends in school and if he
is to be started on a path of self-culture. On this point Stanley Jevons
says:
"In omitting that small expenditure in a universal system of libraries
which would enable young men and women to keep up the three R's and
continue their education, we spend £97 and stingily decline the £3
really needed to make the rest of the £100 effective."
At the International Library Conference in London, in 1897, one of the
most distinguished American librarians, who has been an administrator in
a large educational field outside of the library, expressed his view of
the supreme importance of the library in a scheme of popular education
by saying that if he had to choose between the public school and the
public library--if he could have only one--(though the alternative is
one that never will or can be presented), he would keep the library and
let the school go. For, he argued, every child would learn to read
somehow; and, with a free library that actively sought him, he would be
better off than if he had a school to teach him to read, but no books to
read after he had learned. But however divergent might be opinions
regarding this impossible alternative, there is no doubt that the public
library, with enlarged functions and activities, has at least equal
potentialities with the school. Whether the formal instruction of the
school or the broader education of the library is of greater value,
depends on what is the chief aim. If it is merely to make breadwinners,
the school may be the more useful, though in this, too, the library is
an efficient coadjutor; but if our purpose is to make men and women,
citizens of a progressive nation, active members of an aspiring society,
the library may fairly claim at least equal rank with the school. For
the school wields its direct influence over the average child but a few
years; the library is an active influence through life.
Again, more than ninety-five children out of every hundred leave school
before they are sufficiently mature to comprehend those studies which
open their eyes to the universe, which bear upon their relations to
their fellow-men, upon their duties as citizens of a state, as members
of organized society. These are the studies that deal with the most
important problems that mankind has to solve. They cannot be taught to
children; they cannot be taught--dogmatically--at all. They involve the
consideration of burning questions, subjects of bitter controversy--the
world-old battle between conservatism and innovation which, as Emerson
says, "is the subject of civil history." They cannot be taught by any
teacher, they cannot be taught by any text-book or by any one book.
Their adequate consideration calls for the reading of many books--books
of the present and the future as well as the past. The electrician who
allows himself to be guided by the treatises of twenty years ago would
have no standing; neither has the economist or sociologist who has not
kept up with the literature of the last thirty years--or the last three
years. It would be of no particular advantage for all of us to be
electricians. We can safely trust that field to experts; but it is
extremely desirable that every man should comprehend the great issues of
economics and politics. The school cannot even PRESENT the important
problems of sociology; the university cannot adequately do so without
the library. On no other subject is the wide reading that Matthew Arnold
enjoins so necessary. And no other subject is of such momentous
importance to mankind; for the betterment of social conditions is a
necessary forerunner and foundation of moral and religious progress. And
that cannot be true religion which does not lead to social betterment.
In that noblest aspiration ever put into the mouth and mind and heart
(too often, alas, only the mouth!) of man we are taught to pray not that
we may be transplanted to a better world, but that God's kingdom may
come and His will be done in this world.
We are not likely to abate our eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge of
physical science, for the zeal of the scientist is stimulated by the
spur of commercialism; and, though it seems impossible, the twentieth
century may bring forth as wonderful discoveries and inventions as the
nineteenth. But, to take the advance just now most sought, can any one
raise the question as to which would be of greater benefit to St. Louis,
to reach Chicago in an hour by airship or to take six or ten hours for
the trip and find there--and everywhere--a contented body of workmen
supplying us with the necessities of life and a set of managers carrying
on the transportation system that we already have on equal terms to all
people? What the world's progress most needs is "evening up." The
advancing column presents a very ragged front, with physical science and
its applications so far ahead that they have almost lost sight of social
science in the rear. It would be no great disadvantage to the world--to
the progress of mankind as a whole--if the swift-footed legion of
applied science would merely mark time for a period, while attention
should be given to a better organization of the vast human army. The
objective point would be reached as soon, for a nation is like a railway
train; it can go no faster than its hindmost car. But this is not likely
to happen at present. Applied science has every stimulus from within and
without, every reward intrinsic and extrinsic; while progress in the
social and political sciences must carry the dead weight of the inertia
of conservatism and also meet the active and intense opposition of
vested interests, which have ever the single purpose of preserving the
status quo, no matter how unjust or maleficent.
The solution of these all-important problems cannot be found in the
school, where immature minds are taught merely how to use the tools of
knowledge; these questions cannot be settled by the small number of
university students; they must be solved by the education of the masses,
by instilling in them in their early school years a desire for knowledge
and a love for good reading, which will lead them to continue their
education by means of the library. The education of the mass of the
voters who determine the character of a democratic government, must not
be left to the party organ or the stump speaker. The great social and
political questions should be studied and pondered in the quiet of the
closet and not decided, without previous thought, amid the hurrahs of
the hustings.
To make the public library realize fully its possibilities as the
People's University calls for more than the opportunity which every
public library now offers; it requires active effort to reach out and
bring the people to the library by the fullest co-operation with the
school and by means of attractive lecture courses, which shall stimulate
reading and guide it in profitable channels. But the beginning of this
work--the inculcation of a taste for good reading--lies with the school,
with the library's co-operation, especially during the years from six to
ten or twelve, those years when nearly all the children come under the
school's influence and when the habit of reading can be most easily
formed.
If charged with placing undue stress upon the value of the library, I
might urge its comparative newness and its consequent lack of
recognition; and, as an evidence of the latter, I might point to the
fact that in this great educational exposition, while one vast palace is
given up to exhibits of the school, the library has with difficulty
secured a part of a room in the Missouri State Building for an exhibit
of its activities in the great work of education, in which, as I am
trying to show, its potentialities are as great as those of the school.
As our Board of Directors said, in its appeal to the exposition
Directors for a separate library building:
"The library, besides being the most efficient and most
economical agency for popular education, represents all the
fair will have to show. It stands for the sum total of human
knowledge. It is the instrumentality through which knowledge
has been conserved and cumulated. Only through the library
can civilization continue to advance.... Books are the most
potent factors in progress. Without books we should have had
no powerful locomotives to show, no wireless telegraphy, no
wonder-making machinery, no beautiful buildings, no
impressive statuary, no paintings to arouse wonder and yield
delight--no World's Fair to draw distinguished scientists
and educators from all over the world."
By way of introduction to the comprehensive addresses of the two
distinguished delegates who have travelled four or five thousand miles
to lay before this Section, and, through publication, before the world,
the past history and the present problems of the library, it has seemed
to me appropriate that, as chairman, I should present a brief plea for
the consideration of the library as one of the greatest factors in human
progress. It has existed, though not in its present form or with its
present functions, from the dawn of recorded civilization. It is itself
the record of civilization; and without it there can be no records and
no civilization. It is the repository, the custodian, the preserver of
all the arts and sciences and the principal means of disseminating all
knowledge. With the school and the church it forms the tripod necessary
to the stable equilibrium of society. Let me briefly summarize the
functions of the public library.
1. It doubles the value of the public school instruction, on which is
expended more than ten times the cost of the library.
2. It enables the children who leave school at an early age (an
overwhelming majority) to continue their education while earning their
living. It provides for the education of the adults who have lacked or
failed to utilize early opportunities. This is of special importance in
a country like the United States, where one of the greatest political
problems is the assimilation of a vast influx of ignorant foreigners of
all races and languages.
3. It supplies books and periodicals needed for the instruction of
artisans, mechanics, manufacturers, engineers, and all others whose work
requires technical knowledge[6]--all persons on whom depends the
industrial progress of the community.
4. It furnishes information and inspiration to ministers, teachers,
journalists, authors, physicians, legislators--all persons on whose work
depend the intellectual, moral, sanitary, political and religious
welfare and advancement of the people.
5. It is the stimulus and the reliance of the literary and study clubs,
which, especially among the women, have done much not only for
individual self-culture but also for civic enlightenment and social
betterment. This represents its numerous post-graduate courses, which
are taken by constantly increasing numbers.
6. It has philosophers and theologians to explain and expound and to
exhort those who are willing to listen; but, far better, it has poets
and dramatists and novelists--who compel a hearing and impress on heart
as well as mind the fundamental truths of morality and religion.
7. It is also a school of manners, which have been well defined as minor
morals. The child learns by example and by the silent influence of his
surroundings; and every visit to a library is a lesson in propriety and
refinement. The roughest boy or the rudest man cannot fail to be
impressed by the library atmosphere and by that courtesy which is the
chief element in the "library spirit."
8. It imparts, as the school cannot, knowledge of one's self, and of
one's relations to one's fellow-man, and thus prepares the individual
for citizenship and fellowship in organized society and leads him to be
an active force in social advancement.
9. It elevates the standard of general intelligence throughout the
community, on which depends its material prosperity as well as its moral
and political well-being.
[6] The information furnished by a book in the Cincinnati Public
Library once saved that city a quarter of a million dollars. This in
numerous instances, but on a smaller scale, is a part of the everyday
work of the library.
10. But not last, if an exhaustive list were aimed at--nor least it
supplies a universal and urgent craving of human nature by affording to
all entertainment of the highest and purest character, substituting this
for the coarse, debasing, demoralizing, amusements which would otherwise
be sought and found. Further, it brings relief and strength to many a
suffering body and cheer and solace to many a sorrowing heart. It is
instruction and inspiration to the young, comfort and consolation to the
old, recreation and companionship to all ages and conditions.