toward increased membership. As we have chosen to work along the broader
lines and by the energy of mass rather than that of velocity--with the
sledge-hammer rather than the rifle bullet--it is surely our duty to make
that mass as efficient and as impressive as possible, which means that it
must be swelled to the largest possible proportions. Large membership may
be efficient in two ways, by united weight and by pervasiveness. An army
is powerful in the first way. Ten thousand men concentrated in one spot
may strike a sledge-hammer blow and carry all before them. Yet the same
ten thousand men may police a great city without even seeing one another.
Scattered about on different beats they are everywhere. Every block or two
one meets a patrol and the sense of security that they give is
overwhelming. It is in this way, it seems to me, that large membership in
the American Library Association may be effective. We meet together but
once a year, and even then we do not bring out our full force. We have no
intention of marching on Washington _en masse_ to secure legislation or
even of forcing our trustees to raise salaries by a general library
strike. But if we can make it an unusual thing for a librarian not to be a
member of the American Library Association; if wherever one goes he meets
our members and recognizes what they stand for, then, it seems to me,
public opinion of librarians and librarianship is sure to rise. Our two
savages, who band together for a few moments to lift a log, become by that
act of association marked men among their fellows; the mere fact that they
have intelligence enough to work together for any purpose raises them
above the general level. It is not alone that increasing numbers,
strength, and influence make for the glory of the Association itself; the
most successful bodies of this kind are those that exalt, not themselves
but the professions, localities or ideals that they represent. It is
because increasing our numbers and scattering our membership throughout
the land will increase the influence of the library and strengthen the
hands of those who work in it that I believe such increase a worthy object
of our effort. Associations and societies come and go, form and disband;
they are no more immortal than the men and women that compose them. Yet an
association, like a man, should seek to do the work that lies before it
with all its strength, and to keep that strength at its maximum of
efficiency. So doing, it may rest content that, be its accomplishment
large or small, its place in the history of human endeavor is worthy and
secure.
MODERN EDUCATIONAL METHODS
Those who complain that the average of general education has been lowered
are both right and wrong--right literally and wrong in the general
impression that they give. It is undoubtedly true that among young persons
with whom an educated adult comes intellectually in contact the average of
culture is lower than it was twenty years ago. This is not, however,
because the class of persons who were well educated then are to-day less
well trained, but rather because the class has been recruited from the
ignorant classes, by the addition of persons who were not educated at all
then, or educated very slightly, and who are now receiving a higher,
though still inadequate degree of training. In other words the average of
education among all persons in the community is higher, but the average
among educated persons is lower, because the educated class has been
enlarged by the addition of large numbers of slightly educated persons.
This phenomenon is common to all stages of progress in all sorts of
things. It is true, for instance, in the general advance of the world in
civilization. The average degree of appreciation of art among persons who
know anything of art at all is less, for instance, than in the days of
ancient Greece, because the class of art-lovers throughout the world is
vastly larger and includes a very large number of persons whose
appreciation of art is slight and crude. There is, nevertheless, a greater
total amount of love for art, and a higher average of art education,
taking into account the world's entire population, than there was then.
Let us state the case mathematically: If, of one thousand persons, ten
have a hundred dollars each and the rest nothing, a gift of five dollars
each to five hundred others will raise the average amount owned by each of
the thousand, but will greatly lower the average amount held by the
property owners in the group, who will now number 510, instead of ten.
"How do you demonstrate all this?" will probably be asked. I do not know
of any statistical data that will enable it to be proved directly, but it
is certain that education is becoming more general, which must increase
the number of partly educated persons having an imperfect educational
background--a lack of ancestral training and home influence. Thus, among
the persons with whom the educated adult comes in contact, he necessarily
meets a larger number of individuals than formerly who betray lack of
education in speech, writing or taste; and he wrongly concludes that the
schools are not doing their work properly. If the schools were not doing
their work properly, we should have direct statistical evidence of it, and
all the direct evidence I have seen goes to show that the schools are
accomplishing more to-day and accomplishing it by better methods, than
ever before.
Similarly, I believe that the totality of teaching ability in the
profession has increased. The conspicuous failures are persons who are
unfit to be teachers and who have been drafted into service because of our
sudden increase in educational plant. The result in some cases has been a
curious aberration in disciplinary methods--a freakishness that is
inseparable from any sudden advance such as we are making.
Our schools can and will advance much further in personnel, methods and
results; but they are by no means on the downward path now. One way in
which they may do better work is by greater appreciation of their
selective as well as their training function.
Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity of
potatoes to be prepared for food. Our present educational methods are a
good deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole into
either jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitrary
way unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation. We are
giving in our educational institutions many degrees and many kinds of
training without proper selection of the persons to whom the training is
to be applied. Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made on
arbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness. One boy's education
lasts ten years, and another's two, not because the former is fitted to
profit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens to
have money and inclination to give it to him. One young man studies
medicine and another goes into business, not because these are the careers
for which they are specially fitted, but because one thinks that the
prefix "Doctor" would look well in front of his name and the other has a
maternal uncle in the dry-goods trade.
I am not so foolish as to think that selection of this kind could ever be
made with unerring accuracy, but I do assert that an effort should be made
to effect it in a greater degree through our regular educational
institutions and to leave it less to chance. Our present methods are like
those of wild nature, which scatters seeds broadcast in the hope that some
may settle on favoring soil, rather than those of the skilled cultivator,
who sees that seed and soil are fitted for each other.
In this and other particulars I look for great improvement in our
educational methods; but I do not think that, except in local and
unessential particulars, here and there, they are now retrograding.
SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES[4]
[4] Read at the opening of the Chestnut Hill Branch, Philadelphia
Free Library, January 22, 1909.
Of the three great divisions of economics--production, distribution and
consumption--the library has to do chiefly with the second, and it is as a
distributor of literature that I desire to speak of it, although it has
its share both in the production and consumption of books--more briefly,
in the writing and reading of them. Much writing of books is done wholly
in libraries and by their aid, and much reading is done therein. These
functions I pass by with this brief notice.
A library distributes books. So does a bookseller. The functions of these
two distributors, however, should differ somewhat as do those of the two
producers of books--the author and the publisher. The author creates the
soul of the book and the publisher gives it a body. The former produces
the immaterial, possibly the eternal, part and the latter merely the
material part. Likewise, in our distribution we librarians should lay
stress upon what is in the book, upon the production of the author rather
than on that of the publisher, though we may not neglect the latter. We
are, however, eminently distributors of ideas rather than of mere
merchandise, and in so far as we lay stress on the material side of the
book--important as this is--and neglect what is in it, we are but traders
in books and not librarians.
Among many of the great distributors of ideas--the magazine, the
newspaper, the school--it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any
that do not feel what I may call an anti-civic tendency. They have come to
be supported largely by other agencies than the public, and they are
naturally controlled by those agencies. As for the public, it has become
accustomed to paying less than cost for what it gets along these lines,
and is thus becoming intellectually pauperized. It is no more possible to
distribute ideas at a profit, as a commercial venture, nowadays, than it
would have been to run a circus, with an admission fee, in Imperial Rome.
Thus a literary magazine is possible only because it is owned by some
publisher who uses it as an advertising medium. He can afford to sell it
to the public for less than cost; the public would leave a publication
sold at a fair profit severely alone, hence such a venture is impossible.
A scientific magazine in like manner must have some one to back it--a firm
of patent-office brokers or a scientific society. The daily papers depend
almost wholly on their advertisements; the public would not buy a simple
compilation of the day's news at a fair profit. Even our great
institutions of higher education give their students more than the latter
pay for; the student is getting part of his tuition for nothing. A college
that depends wholly on tuition fees for its support is soon left without
students. Thus all these disseminators of ideas are not dependent on the
persons to whom they distribute those ideas, for whose interest it is that
the ideas shall be good and true and selected with discrimination. They
depend rather for support on outside bodies of various kinds and so tend
to be controlled by them--bodies whose interests do not necessarily
coincide with those of the public. This is not true of material things.
Their distributors still strive to please the public, for it is by the
public that they are supported. If the public wants raspberry jam,
raspberry jam it gets; and if, being aroused, it demands that this shall
be made out of raspberries instead of apples, dock-seeds and aniline, it
ultimately has its way. But if the department store were controlled by
some outside agency, benevolent or otherwise, which partly supported it
and enabled it to sell its wares below cost, then if this controlling
agency willed that we should eat dock-seeds and aniline--dock-seeds and
aniline we should doubtless eat.
Not that the controlling powers in all these instances are necessarily
malevolent. The publisher who owns a literary magazine may honestly desire
that it shall be fearlessly impartial. The learned body that runs a
scientific periodical may be willing to admit to its pages a defense of a
thesis that it has condemned in one of its meetings; the page-advertiser
in a great daily may be able to see his pet policy attacked in its
editorial columns without yielding to the temptation to bring pressure to
bear; the creator of an endowed university may view with equanimity an
attack by one of its professors on the methods by which he amassed his
wealth. All these things may be; we know in fact that they have been and
that they are. But unfortunately we all know of cases where the effect of
outside control has been quite the contrary. The government of a
benevolent despot, we are told, would be ideal; but alas! rules for making
a despot benevolent and for ensuring that he and his successors shall
remain so, are not yet formulated. We have fallen back on the plan of
fighting off the despot--good though he may possibly be; would that we
could also abolish the non-civic control of the disseminators of ideas!
Are there, then, no disseminators of ideas free from interference? Yes,
thank heaven, there are at least two--the public school and the public
library. Of these, the value of academic freedom to the public school is
slight, because the training of the very young is of its nature subject
little to the influences of which we have spoken. There is little
opportunity, during a grammar school or high school course, to influence
the mind in favor of particular government policies and particular
theories in science or literature or art. This opportunity comes later.
And it is later that the public library does its best work. Supported by
the public it has no impulse and no desire to please anyone else. No
suspicion of outside control hangs over it. It receives gifts; but they
are gifts to the public, held by the public, not by outsiders. It is
tax-supported, and the public pays cost price for what it gets--no more
and no less. The community has the power of abolishing the whole system in
the twinkling of an eye. The library's power in an American municipality
lies in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its
position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of
my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no
religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a
blight over it. It is untrammeled.
How long is it to remain thus? That is for its owners, the public, to say.
I confess that I feel uneasy when I realize how little the influence of
the public library is understood by those who might try to wield that
influence, either for good or for evil. Occasionally an individual tries
to use it sporadically--the poet who tries to secure undying fame by
distributing free copies of his verses to the libraries, the manufacturer
who gives us an advertisement of his product in the guise of a book, the
enthusiast who runs over our shelf list to see whether the library is well
stocked with works on his fad--socialism or Swedenborgianism, or the "new
thought." But, so far, there has been no concerted, systematic effort on
the part of classes or bodies of men to capture the public library, to
dictate its policy, to utilize its great opportunities for influencing the
public mind. When this ever comes, as it may, we must look out!
So far as my observation goes, the situation--even the faintest glimmering
of it--is far from dawning on most of these bodies. Most individuals, when
the policy of the library suits them not, exhaust their efforts in an
angry kick or an epistolary curse; they never even think of trying to
change that policy, even by argument. Most of them would rather write a
letter to a newspaper, complaining of a book's absence, than to ask the
librarian to buy it. Organizations--civil, religious, scientific,
political, artistic--have usually let us severely alone, where their
influence, if they should come into touch with the library, would surely
be for good--would be exerted along the line of morality, of more careful
book selection, of judicial mindedness instead of one-sidedness.
Let us trust that influences along this line--if we are to have influences
at all--may gain a foothold before the opposite forces--those of sordid
commercialism, of absurdities, of falsities, of all kinds of
self-seeking--find out that we are worth their exploitation.
When it comes, as I expect it will some day--this general realization of
what only a few now understand--that the public library is worth trying to
influence and to exploit, our trouble will be that we shall be without any
machinery at all to receive it, to take care of it, to direct the good
into proper channels and to withstand the evil. We are occasionally
annoyed and disconcerted now by the infinitesimal amount of it that we
see; we wish people would mind their own business; we detest meddlers; we
should be able to do more work if it were not for the bores--and so on.
But what--what in heaven's name shall we do with the deluge when it comes?
With what dam shall we withstand it; through what sluices shall we lead
it; into what useful turbines shall we direct it? These things are worth
pondering.
For the present then, this independence of the library as a distributor
may be regarded as one of its chief economic advantages. Another is its
power as a leveler, and hence as an adjunct of democracy. Democracy is a
result, not a cause, of equality. It is natural in a community whose
members resemble each other in ability, modes of thought and mental
development, just as it is unthinkable where great natural differences,
racial or otherwise, exist. If we wish to preserve democracy, therefore,
we must first maintain our community on something like a level. And we
must level it up, not down; for although a form of democracy may exist
temporarily among individuals equally ignorant or degraded, the advent of
a single person more advanced in the scale of ability, quickly transforms
it into absolutism. Similar inequalities may result in an aristocratic
régime. The reason why England, with its ancient aristocracy, on the
whole, is so democratic, is that its commoners are constantly recruited by
the younger sons of its nobility, so that the whole body politic is
continually stirred and kept more homogeneous than on the continent, where
all of a noble's sons and daughters are themselves noble. This stirring or
levelling process may be effected in many ways and along many lines, but
in no way better than by popular education, as we have well understood in
this country. This is why our educational system is a bulwark of our form
of government, and this is why the public library--the only continuous
feature of that system, exercising its influence from earliest childhood
to most advanced age--is worth to the community whatever it may cost in
its most improved form. There are enough influences at work to segregate
classes in our country, and they come to us ready-made from other
countries; we may be thankful that the public library is helping to make
Americans of our immigrants and to make uniformly cultivated and
well-informed Americans of us all.
Another interesting light on the functions of the printed page, and hence
of the library, is shown by the recent biological theory that connects the
phenomena of heredity with those of habit and memory. The inheritance of
ancestral characteristics, according to this view, may be described as
racial memory. To illustrate, we may take an interesting study of a family
of Danish athletes, recently made and published in France. The members of
this family, adults and children, men and women, have all been gymnasts
for over three hundred years--no one of them would think of adopting any
other means of gaining a livelihood. It seems certain to the scientific
men who have been conducting the investigation, that not only the physical
ability to become an acrobat, but also the mental qualities that
contribute so much to success in this occupation--pride in the acrobatic
pre-eminence of the family, courage, love of applause, and so on--have
been handed down from one generation to another, and that it has cost each
generation less time and effort to acquire its skill than its predecessor.
In other words, we are told, members of this family are born with certain
predispositions--latent ancestral memories, we may say, of the occupations
of previous generations. To make these effective, it is necessary only to
awaken them, and this may be done simply by the sight of other persons
performing gymnastic feats. These they learn in weeks, where others,
without such ancestral memories, would require months or years.
Evidently this may be applied much more widely than to mere physical
skill. Few of us can boast of gymnastic ancestry, but all of us have
inherited predispositions and have ancestral memories that make it easier
for us to learn certain things and to choose certain courses than we
should find it without them. Some of these are good; some bad. Some are
useful; some injurious. It is necessary only to awaken them to set going a
train of consequences; if not awakened, they may remain permanently
dormant. How important, therefore, are the suggestions that may serve as
such awakeners; how necessary to bring forward the useful, and to banish
the injurious ones!
Now of all possible agencies that may bring these predispositions into
play--that may awaken our ancestral memories, if you choose to adopt this
theory--I submit that the book stands at the very head. For it is itself a
racial record; it may contain, in the form best suited to awaken our
predispositions, the very material which, long ages ago, was instrumental
in handing those predispositions down to us. It is in tune with our latent
memories, and it may set them vibrating more vigorously than any merely
contemporary agency.
Does this not place in a new and interesting light the library and the
books of which it is composed? We have learned to respect them as the
records of the race and to recognize their value as teachers and their
power as energizers; in addition we now see that they may act as fingers
on invisible mental triggers. A slight impulse--altogether trivial
compared with its effect--and off goes the gun. The discharge may carry a
line to a wrecked ship, or it may sink her with all on board.
We frequently hear it said of some book whose tendency is bad: "Well, it
can't hurt me, anyway; I'm immune." Are you quite sure? Have you gone
quite to the bottom of those ancestral memories of yours, and are you
certain that there are none that such a book may rouse, to your harm?
On the other hand, does this not explain much that has always interested
the librarian; for instance, the vast popularity of fairy tales,
especially those that date back to our racial infancy? I need dwell no
further on the economic importance of the book as viewed from this
standpoint.
But it has also a function almost diametrically opposed to that which we
have just considered; besides harking back to what is oldest it looks
forward to what is newest. It may stir us by awakening dim racial
recollections; but it may also thrill us by adding to the store of what is
already in the mind. In fact, we like to assimilate new ideas, to think
new thoughts, to do new acts; we like to read or hear something that we
could not have produced ourselves. When we are young and ignorant,
therefore, we like music or art or literature that appears trivial to us
as we grow older and have developed our own creative powers. A poem that
is no better than one a man might dash off himself he likes no longer; he
prefers to be confronted with something that is above and beyond his own
powers, though not above his comprehension. Thus, as he grows, his zone of
enjoyment shifts upward, and the library covers the whole moving field.
When Solomon John Peterkin, pen in hand, sat down to write a book, he
discovered that he hadn't anything to say. Happy lad! He had before him
all literature as a field of enjoyment, for all, apparently, was beyond
his creative efforts.
Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended the
relations between the tonic and the dominant chords? I have heard a small
boy at a piano play these alternately for hours. Such a performance is
torture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it is
new and has just come into his sphere of creative power. When he is
thoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandons
it for something newer and a little higher. The boy who discovers, without
being told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces a
certain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par with
Wagner's searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that are
often beyond technical explanation.
The child who reads what you think is a trivial book, re-reads it, and
reads others like it, is doing this same thing in the domain of
literature--he is following the natural course that will bring him out at
the top after a while.
When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but
potential. A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface,
but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of
which we have touched on but a few--the invisible ancestral memories of
centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our older selves and
our posterity of centuries hence. When we think of it, it is hard to
realize that a book has not a soul.
Gerald Stanley Lee, in his latest book, a collection of essays on
millionaires, sneers at the efforts of the rich mill owners to improve
their employees by means of libraries. Life in a modern mill, he thinks,
is so mechanical as to dull all the higher faculties. "Andrew Carnegie,"
he says (and he apparently uses the name merely as that of a type), "has
been taking men's souls away and giving them paper books."