A forecast, not of library progress alone, but of
civilization itself, by one who declares himself "a
simple-minded visionary optimist." It is of the warp and
woof of visions like this that the fabric of a better world
is woven. Frederick Morgan Crunden, who delivered this
address at the public session of the Philadelphia Conference
of the American Library Association, 1897, was not, it is
true, the technical founder of the St. Louis Public Library,
but in his thirty-year administration of it, he originated
and kept in motion the forces that have given it the
position that it now holds in the community. These forces
and their results were both social, and his address forms a
fitting conclusion to this compilation of material on "The
Library and Society." A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in
Vol. I of this series.
The present Victorian jubilee has naturally brought out a fresh group of
reminiscences comparing conditions at the beginning of the reign with
those now existing. The most striking contrast between the two periods
lies in the advances made in the material comforts of life--improvements
in lighting and heating, in locomotion and intercommunication. The
progress of applied science has been so rapid that some of its most
notable achievements have come within the memory of young persons still
at school. Telephonic conversation between New York and St. Louis is
only a thing of yesterday; aerial navigation is evidently near at hand;
and already daring scientists speak hopefully of electric communication
with the planets.
But it is not only in this line that the world has advanced. To note
great changes in social customs, we need not go back to the last
century. Sir Algernon West in a recent magazine article refers to the
matter-of-course manner in which his chief was in the habit of
announcing to the head clerk that he would not be at the office the
following day, as he was to dine out that evening. As an indication of
the social changes brought about in his lifetime, he quotes this
significant sentence of Mr. Charles Villiers: "In his young days," said
Mr. Villiers, "every young man, even if he was busy, pretended to be
idle; now every young man, even if he is idle, pretends to be busy."
There is great import in this. When every member of society is usefully
employed, our social problems will be well on the way to solution.
To note progress in another direction we need not turn back to the acts
of the 14th century, which made it a crime to give or receive more than
the wretched wage fixed by law. At the beginning of the Victorian era
boys and girls as young as six years worked in mines and factories
longer hours than are now required of strong men; and the masses of
people were compelled to pay an artificially high price for their bread,
in order to increase the unearned wealth of the few.
And in our own country we need not go back to the Salem witchcraft or
the persecution of the Quakers. There are still eye-witnesses to tell us
that men and women in this "land of the free," were lawfully sold like
cattle or flogged to death at the will of their owners. It was a few
months after Queen Victoria's accession to the throne that Elijah Parish
Lovejoy was killed for daring to say that human slavery was wrong--for
advocating, not forcible abolition, but gradual emancipation as "the
free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its
propriety." For maintaining his right to express his opinions on this or
any other public question, he was driven from place to place and finally
shot down in cold blood. In the city where 60 years ago he fell, a
martyr to the cause of free speech, a stately monument--one of the most
imposing in the country--was the other day dedicated to his memory. No
American better deserves a monument. No leader in the Revolution or the
Civil War was a greater hero. In my opinion, the unquestioned courage of
the great Union commander is dwarfed and paled by the simple heroism of
this young preacher-editor, who gave his life to a greater cause than
even the preservation of the Union. Yet for some years after his death,
in many cities of this country, it would have been hazardous for a man
to utter his eulogy.
Here, then, is a marked advance. But we have not yet obtained entire
freedom of speech on live topics. Was it not as late as last year that
we hear of two librarians holding opposite political views, whose
positions were rendered insecure by an unfortunate misadjustment of
longitudes and political opinions? And not many miles from here a score
of good, earnest men were jailed for advocating, disinterestedly, and at
considerable self-sacrifice, a method of taxation that did not meet the
approval of the city authorities. Still we have made great progress
toward a broad tolerance. We not only permit the practice of all
religious forms, but we even allow a man to deny himself the
consolations of religion in any form if he chooses to do so.
In science, at least, there is absolute freedom of thought and
expression. One may publish arguments to prove that the world is five
thousand, or five hundred million years old, and no one will molest or
denounce him; or he may announce a new theory of the universe with our
moon as the stationary centre, and no state or church will
anathematize him or compel him to recant. It is not till he enters the
field of politics, i.e., the discussion of economic and sociological
questions with a view to immediate practical results, that the
advocate of new ideas reaches the danger-point. Here he finds vested
interests--self-styled "vested rights," but as often vested wrongs--on
guard and alert to repel intrusion and resist inquiry. These summon to
their aid the legions of unreasoning conservatism; and the innovator
is made to feel the truth of the saying that there is no pain so keen
as the pain of a new idea--from which, therefore, mankind has always
shrunk, as a child shrinks from the surgeon's knife. We have passed
the period of rack and stake; but social and business ostracism are
pretty effective, while occasionally there are suggestions of
tar-buckets or bullets. For the most part, however, we content
ourselves with denouncing the proposer of any marked departure from
existing political or sociological conditions as a "socialist," a
"communist," and an "anarchist," using these terms indiscriminately as
abusive epithets without any definite knowledge of their meaning. From
the beginning of time every social advance--and until recently every
forward step in science or religion has been regarded as menacing the
very foundations of society. The Reform Act of 1832, which simply took
the first step towards correcting the grossest political abuses, was
looked upon by the Duke of Wellington and other good men as
threatening the very existence of the kingdom. The condition of
affairs then existing, they considered, if not the best possible, at
any rate vastly better than the political chaos that would be sure to
result from change. Speaking on this blind conservative opposition to
the Reform Bill, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, said:
"All the resistance to these natural changes can effect is to derange
their operation, and make them act violently and mischievously instead
of healthfully, or at least harmlessly. The old state of things is gone
past recall, and all the efforts of all the tories cannot save it; but
they may by their folly, as they did in France, get us a wild democracy
or a military despotism in the room of it, instead of letting it change
quietly into what it is, merely a new modification of the old state. One
would think that people who talk against change were literally as well
as metaphorically blind, and really did not see that everything in
themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary law
of its being.
"There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so
unnatural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things
fixed, when all the world is, by the very law of its creation, in
eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be
traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and
corruption--that our business is to preserve and not to improve."
In his retrospect of the Victorian reign, in the June Review of Reviews,
W.T. Stead says: "It is to the stoutest conservatives of our time almost
inconceivable that rational beings could ever have defended the system
that prevailed in Britain sixty years ago."
I am no more assured of the rising of to-morrow's sun than I am that to
the stoutest conservatives of 1950, it will appear "almost inconceivable
that rational beings could ever have defended the system" that prevails
in America to-day. They will, however, resist further progress as
doggedly as do the conservatives of to-day, even while these see plainly
how absurd was the attitude of their predecessors of sixty years ago.
Your genuine conservative ever holds doggedly to things as they are. He
clings tenaciously--and vainly. He belongs to a party whose defeat all
history teaches is foredoomed. Now he stands for the divine right of
kings; and notwithstanding he is a man of irreproachable character and
able, moreover, to show that he is much less autocratic than most of his
predecessors, he loses his crown and his head. Again, he stands for the
parent country's unlimited power of taxation, and he forfeits his most
flourishing colonies. At another period he urges long sufferance as a
justification for continuing--even extending--the crime of slavery, and
he meets defeat amid slaughter and devastation. No repetition of the
lesson will ever teach him to consider what is abstractly right--what
ought to be without reference to what is.
But the conservative has to be, in accordance with the law of nature, so
poetically announced in the song of Willis in Iolanthe:
"That every boy and every gal
That's born into this world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!"