Great changes have come about in the methods that obtain for the
exercise of popular government. In a democracy whose chief strength
is derived from an intelligent public opinion, the sharpening of such
intelligence and enlargement of general knowledge concerning affairs
of common concern are of paramount importance. Statute books are
heavily cumbered with laws that are unenforced because public opinion
goes counter to them. Nonenforcement breeds disrespect for law, and
unscientific making of laws leads to their disregard. So the earliest
attempts to find a remedy contemplated merely the legislator and
the official, bringing together for their use through the combined
services of trained economists and of expert reference librarians
the principles and foundation for contemplated legislation and the
data as to similar attempts elsewhere. Fruitful as this service has
proved within the limitation of state and municipal officialdom,
a broadened conception of possibilities now enlarges the scope of
the work to include citizen organizations interested in the study
of public questions, students of sociology, economics and political
science, business men keenly alive to the intimate association--in a
legitimate sense--of business and politics, and that new and powerful
element in public affairs which has added three million voters to the
poll lists in ten states, and will soon add eleven million voters
more in the remaining thirty-eight. The new library service centering
in state and municipal legislative reference libraries, and in civic
departments of large public libraries, forecasts the era, now rapidly
approaching, when aldermen and state representatives will still enact
laws and state and city officials will enforce them, but their making
will be determined strictly by public opinion. The local government
of the future will be by quasi-public citizen organizations directing
aldermen and state legislators accurately to register their will. When
representative government becomes misrepresentative, in the words of
a modern humorist, democracy will ask the Powers that Be whether they
are the Powers that Ought to Be. To intelligently determine the answer,
public opinion must not ignorantly ask.
X
This has been called the age of utilitarianism. Such it unquestionably
is, but its practicality is not disassociated from idealism. The
resources of numberless commercial enterprises are each in this day
reckoned in millions, and their products are figured in terms of many
millions more, as once thousands represented the spread of even the
greatest of industries. But more and more business men are coming to
realize that business organization as it affects for weal or woe
thousands who contribute to their success, must be conducted as a trust
for the common good, and not merely for selfish exploitation, or for
oppression. As the trade guilds of old wielded their vast power for
common ends, so all the workers gave the best at their command to make
their articles of merchandise the most perfect that human skill and
care could produce. Men of business whose executive skill determines
the destinies of thousands in their employ, are growing more and more
to an appreciation of the trusteeship that is theirs. A humane spirit
is entering the relationship between employer and employed. Great
commercial organizations are conducting elaborate investigations into
conditions of housing, sanitation, prolongation of school life, social
insurance and similar subjects of betterment for the toilers; but a
brief span ago they were concerned chiefly with trade extension and
lowering of wages, all unconcerned about the living conditions of
their dependents. They too are now exemplifying the possession of that
constructive imagination which builds large and beyond the present.
For results that grow out of experience and of experiment they also
are in part dependent upon the sifted facts that are found in print.
The business house library is a recent development, and in ministering
in different ways to both employer and employed, gives promise of
widespread usefulness.