The need of stronger forces in popular education--the
failure of the press--the library's opportunity, as it
appeared to a scholarly librarian of the so-called "old
school" in 1894.
Joseph Nelson Larned was born in Chatham, Ontario, May 11,
1836, and was educated in the public schools of Buffalo,
N.Y. He served on the editorial staff of the Buffalo
_Express_ in 1859-72, was superintendent of education in
Buffalo in 1872-73 and superintendent of the Buffalo Library
from 1877 until it became the Public Library in 1897, after
which he devoted himself to literature until his death in
1913. His best known work is his History for Ready Reference
and Topical Reading. He was president of the A.L.A. in
1893-94.
It was my misfortune to be absent from the meeting at which you did me
the honor to elect me to this place, and I had no opportunity, either to
give my advice against that action, or to thank you for the distinction
with which it clothes me. The advice I would have given is now belated;
but my thanks have lost no warmth by the delay, and I pray you to accept
them with belief in their sincerity. At the same time I shall venture to
draw from the circumstances a certain claim upon your generosity. If it
happens to me to be tripped in some of these tangles of procedure which,
in such meetings as this, await the stumbling feet of an untrained
presiding officer, be good enough to remember the warning I would have
given you if I had had the opportunity.
We are gathered for the sixteenth meeting of the American Library
Association, in the eighteenth year of its existence. Our league of the
libraries is young; its history is unpretentious; but it is the history
of a movement of higher importance to the world that many others that
have marched with trumpets, and drums. Eighteen years ago, the
conception of the Library militant, of the Library as a moving force in
the world, of the Librarian as a missionary of literature, was one which
a few men only had grasped; but with which those few had already begun
the doing of a revolutionary work. To-day such ideals are being realized
in most corners of the American republic. The last generation, and the
generations before the last, were satisfied with the school as an agent
of popular education. In our time we have brought the library to the
help of the school, and the world is just opening its eyes to perceive
the enormous value of the reinforcement that is gained from this new
power.
And the discovery has come none too soon; for a desperate need of more
and stronger forces in the work of popular education is pressing on us.
If we reflect on the social conditions of the present day, and review a
little the working of the ferments in civilized society during a few
years last past, we shall marvel, I think, at the timeliness of the
movement which brings the public library, just now, to the front of
action among the instruments and agencies of popular education. It is
our fortune, good or ill as we may regard it, to be unmistakably passing
through one of the greater crisies of human history. In the last
century, modern democracy got its political footing in the world. Its
birth was older, and it had been cradled in divers nursing places,
Swiss, Dutch, English, and New English; but last century it stepped into
political history as the actor of the leading part; as the sovereign of
the future, mounting his throne. From the moment it came on the stage,
all wise men knew that its need above every other need was education.
They made haste, in our country, to build school-houses and to set the
school-master at work; seeing plainly that all they might hope for and
strive for in the future would depend on the intelligence that could be
put into the brain of this omnipotent sovereign who had risen to rule
the world.
Well, the schools and the school-masters served their purpose
reasonably well for a reason. Democracy was fairly equipped with a
spelling-book and a quill-pen for the duties and responsibilities of a
simple, slowly-moving time. The mass of its members, the every-day
people of the farm and the shop, read the pamphlets and the weekly
gazettes of their day, and were gently drawn, with unconfused minds,
into one or the other of two straightly opposed political parties which
sought their votes. If they lacked knowledge, there was a certain
ingenuousness in their character which paid respect to the opinions of
men who had more. If blundering in politics occurred, it was blundering
leadership, for the most part, and more easily corrected than perversity
in the ranks. So the reign of democracy was successful enough while
society kept the simpler state.
But that simpler state is gone. We who are beyond middle age may say
that we have seen it disappear. We have witnessed a miraculous
transformation of the earth and of the people who dwell on it. We have
seen the passing of Aladdin, who rubbed his magical electric lamp as he
went calling Afreets from the air to be the common servants of man. A
change has been wrought within fifty years that is measureless, not only
in itself, but in its effects on the human race. The people who whisper
in each other's ears across a continent; who know at noon-time in
Nebraska what happened in the morning at Samarcand; the people to whom a
hundred leagues are neighborhood, and a thousand but easy distance; for
whom there is little mystery left on the face of the earth, nor anything
hidden from their eyes; these people of our day are not in the likeness
of the men and women who ambled horseback or rode in coaches from town
to town, and who were content with a weekly mail. The fitting and
furniture of mind that would make a safe member of society and a good
citizen out of the man of small horizons, who lived the narrower life of
a generation or two ago, are perilously scant for these times.
It is true that all the wonderful quickening of life which has occurred
carries something of education in itself, and that men learn by living
under the conditions of the present day; but the learning caught in that
way is of the dangerous kind. It is the delusive knowledge of the
surface of things; the deceitful lore which breeds mischievous beliefs
and makes them fanatical. It goes but a little way, if at all, toward
the saving of society, as against the unrest, the discontent, the
desire, which torment such an age of revolution as ours.
And the threatening fact is this: that ignorant opinions have acquired
at the present day a capacity for harm enormously increased over that of
the elder times. They share the magnified potency that is given to all
things, good or ill, by the science of the modern man. Its million
tongues are lent to them for propagation; but that is a matter of small
seriousness compared with the boundless ease of combination which it
offers to them at the same time. It is in that appalling facility of
alliance and organization, which present conditions have given to men
and women of every class and character, for every kind of aim and
purpose, that the greatest peril of society lies in our day. A peril,
that is to say, so long as society has no assurance that the leagues and
confederacies formed within its bosom will be prevailingly well
instructed and intelligently controlled.
As a serious danger this is something quite new. It has come upon us
within recent years. I can remember a state of things in which it was
difficult for a man in common life to join himself with other men, much
beyond his own neighborhood, in any effectual way, excepting as he did
it on the lines of an old political party or an older church. But,
to-day, leagues, unions, federations, associations, orders, rings, form
themselves among the restless, unstable elements of the time as clouds
are formed in the atmosphere, and with kindred lightning flashes and
mutterings of thunder. Any boldly ignorant inventor of a new economical
theory or a new political doctrine, or a new cornerstone for the fabric
of society, can set on foot a movement from Maine to California, between
two equinoxes, if he handles his invention with dexterity. This is what
invests popular ignorance with terrors which never appeared in it
before, and it is this which has brought the real, responsible test of
democracy, social and political, on our time and on us.
Democracy, in fact, has remained considerably, hitherto, an unworked
theory of society, even in communities which have supposed themselves to
be democratically constituted. It has remained so through want of
conditions that would give a clear sound to the individual voice and
free play to the individual will. Those conditions are now arriving in
the world, and the democratic régime is consequently perfecting itself,
not politically alone, but economically, and in all the social relations
of mankind.
So it is not exaggeration to say that we have come to a situation in
which society must fight for its life against popular ignorance. The old
agencies of education are inadequate, when the best has been made of
them. The common school does not go far enough, and cannot. Its chief
function is to prepare a soil in the young mind for the after
seed-planting which will produce fruits of intelligence. Unsupplemented,
it is well-nigh barren of true educational results. The higher schools
and colleges reach too small a number to count for much in a problem
which concerns the teaching of the universal millions. What agency,
then, is there, that will prepare the democracy of the present and the
future for its tremendous responsibilities?
Some may say, the newspaper press: and I would rejoice if we could
accept that reply. For the press is an educating power that might
transform the civilization of the world as swiftly in mind and morals as
steam and electricity have transformed its material aspects. There is
nothing conceivable in the way of light and leading for mankind which a
conscientious and cultivated newspaper press might not do within a
single generation. But a press of that character and that effect seems
possible only under circumstances of disinterestedness which are not
likely to exist. The publication of a newspaper may sometimes be
undertaken as a duty, but not often. As a rule it is a business, like
any other, with the mercenary objects of business; and as a rule, too,
the gain sought is more readily and more certainly found by pandering to
popular ignorance than by striving against it. A few newspapers can
secure a clientage which they please best by dignity, by cleanness, by
sober truthfulness, and by thoughtful intelligence, in their columns;
but the many are tempted always, not merely to stoop to low tastes and
vulgar sentiments, but to cultivate them; because there is gravitation
in the moral as well as the physical world, and culture in the downward
way is easier than the upward.
The vulgarizing of the news press has been a late and rapid process,
nearly coincident in cause and event with the evolution of this modern
democracy which it makes more problematical. We need not be very old to
have seen the beginnings: the first skimming of the rich daily news of
the world for the scum and froth of it; the first invention of that
disgusting brew, from public sewers and private drains, with which the
popular newspapers of the day feed morbid appetites. We can recall the
very routes by which it was carried from city to city, and taken up by
journal after journal, as they discovered a latent, un-developed taste
for such ferments of literature in the communities around them. The
taste was latent, potential; it did not exist as a fact; it was not
conscious of itself; it made no demands. The newspapers deliberately
sought it out, delved for it, brought it to the surface, fed it,
stimulated it, made it what it is to-day, an appetite as diseased and as
shamefully pandered to as the appetite for intoxicating drams.
And, so far as I can perceive, this action and reaction between what is
ignorant and vulgar in the public and what is mercenary and unscrupulous
in the press will go on until popular education from other sources puts
an end to it. For it is the saving fact that there are other sources;
and foremost among them are the public libraries. If it has been our
privilege to see, and for some in our circle to bear a part in, the
beginnings of the active educational work of the libraries, I am
persuaded that it is only the beginnings we have witnessed as yet. I am
persuaded that the public library of the future will transcend our
dreams in its penetrating influence. Consider for a moment what it is,
and what it offers to the energies of education which a desperate
necessity is awakening and organizing in the world! It is a store, a
reservoir, of the new knowledge of the latest day and the ripened wisdom
of the long past. To carry into the memory and into the thought of all
the people who surround it, in a town, even some little part of what it
holds of instructed reasoning and instructed feeling, would be to
civilize that community beyond the highest experience of civilization
that mankind has yet attained to. There is nothing that stands equally
beside it as a possible agent of common culture. It is the one fountain
of intellectual life which cannot be exhausted; which need not be
channeled for any fortunate few; which can be generously led to the
filling of every cup, of every capacity, for old or young. There is
little in it to tempt the befouling hand of the politician, and it
offers no gain to the mercantile adventurer. For those who serve it on
behalf of the public there are few allurments of money or fame. Its vast
powers for good are so little exposed to seduction or corruption that it
seems to give promises for the future which are safer and surer than any
others that society can build hopes upon.
In this view, those who serve the public libraries have a great
responsibility laid on them. They hold in their hands what would give to
civilization an ideal refinement if it could be distributed and
communicated to all. As we know very well, that is impossible. There is
a part of mankind, in every community, which never will feel, never can
be made to feel, the gentle attractiveness and influence of books. The
fact is one not to be disputed or ignored. At the same time it is a fact
to be treated practically as though it did not exist. It is our business
to assume that the mission of good books, books of knowledge, books of
thought, books of inspiration, books of right feeling, books of
wholesome imagination, can be pushed to every hearth, and to every child
and parent who sits by it. And it is our business to labor unsparingly
toward the making of that assumption good, without reckoning any
fraction of hopelessness in it.
That is the business to which we are appointed in this world. Let us be
careful that we do not misconceive it in one most important particular!
It is not the mission of _books_ that we are charged with, but the
mission of _good books_. And there lies a delicate, difficult, very
grave duty in that discrimination. To judge books with adequate
knowledge and sufficient hospitality of mind; to exercise a just choice
among them without offensive censorship; to defend his shelves against
the endless siege of vulgar literature, and yet not waste his strength
in the resistance--these are really the crucial demands made on every
librarian.
For the first condition of successful work is a good tool; and our tools
are not _books_, but _good books_. These given, then follow those
demands on us which we sometimes discuss as though they came first of
all: the demands, that is, for a perfected apparatus in the working
library, for a tireless energy in its motive forces, and for a large
intelligence in the directing of them.
Not many years ago, our missionary undertakings from the library seemed
to be bounded by its own walls. The improving, annotating, and
popularizing of catalogues; the printing and distributing of bulletins
and reference lists; the surrounding of readers and seekers in a library
with willing help and competent suggestion; these labors seemed, only a
few years ago, to include almost everything that the librarian most
zealous as a missionary could do. But see what doors have been opening
in the last few years, and what illimitable fields of labor now invite
him! Through one, the great army of the teachers in the common schools
is coming into co-operation with him. Through another, he steps into the
movement of university extension, and finds in every one of its servants
a true apostle of the library mission of good books. From a third, he
spreads his beneficient snares about a city in branches and delivery
stations; and by a fourth he sends "traveling libraries" to the ends of
his State.
The arena of our work is large enough already to make claims on every
faculty and power we can bring to it; and yet our plainest duty is to
enlarge it still. I think we may be sure that there are portals yet to
open, agents yet to enlist, alliances yet to enter, conquests yet to
make. And in the end--what?
Those of us who have faith in the future of democracy can only hold our
faith fast by believing that the knowledge of the learned, the wisdom of
the thoughtful, the conscience of the upright, will some day be common
enough to prevail, always, over every factious folly and every
mischievous movement that evil minds of ignorance can set astir. When
that blessed time of victory shall have come, there will be many to
share the glory of it; but none among them will rank rightly before
those who have led and inspired the work of the public libraries.