confidence that when the facts are known we shall find a way to deal with
them, and that until the facts are known we shall not be able to act--not
even to think. Our ancestors thought and acted sometimes on premises that
seem to us frightfully flimsy--they tried, as Dean Swift painted them in
his immortal satire, to get sunbeams from cucumbers. There are some
sunbeam-chasers among us to-day, but even they recognize the need of real
cucumbers to start with; the imaginary kind will not do. I recently heard
a great teacher of medicine say that the task of the modern physician is
merely to ascertain the facts on which the intelligent public is to act.
How different that sounds from the dicta of the medicine of a past
generation! It is the same everywhere: we are demanding an accurate
survey--an ascertainment of the facts in any field in which action, based
on inference and judgment, is seen to be necessary. Now the library is
nothing more nor less than a storehouse of recorded facts. It is becoming
so more truly and more fully every day, thereby adjusting itself to the
modern temper of which I have already spoken. The library and its users
are coming more closely together, in sympathy, in aims and in action, than
ever before--partly a result and partly a justification for that Homeric
method of popularizing it which has been characterized and condemned as
commercial. The day when the librarian, or the professor, or the clergyman
could retire into his tower and hold aloof from the vulgar herd is past.
The logical result of such an attitude is now being worked out on the
continent of Europe. Not civilizations, as some pessimists are lamenting,
but the forces antagonistic to civilization are there destroying one
another, and there is hope that a purified democracy will arise from the
wreckage. May our American civilization never have to run the gantlet of
such a terrible trial! Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the hope for
the future efficiency of all our public institutions, including the
library, lies in the success of democracy, and that depends on the
existence and improvement of the conditions in whose absence democracy
necessarily fails. Foremost among these is the homogeneity of the
population. The people among whom democracy succeeds must have similar
standards, ideas, aims and abilities. Democracy may exist in a pack of
wolves, but not in a group that is half wolves and half men. Either the
wolves will kill the men or the men the wolves. This is an extreme case,
but it is true in general that in a community made up of irreconcilable
elements there can be no true democracy. And the same oneness of vision
and purpose that conduces to the success of democracy will also bring to
perfection such great democratic institutions as the library, which have
already borne such noteworthy fruit among us just because we are
homogeneous beyond all other nations on the earth. And here progress is by
action and reaction, as we see it so often in the world. The unity of aims
and abilities that makes democracy and democratic institutions possible is
itself facilitated and increased by the work of those institutions. The
more work the library does, the more its ramifications multiply, and the
further they extend, the more those conditions are favored that make the
continuance of the library possible. In working for others, it is working
for itself, and every additional bit of strength and sanity that it takes
on does but enable it to work for others the more. And if the democracy
whose servant it is will but realize that it has grown up as a part of
that American system to which we are all committed--to which we owe all
that we are and in which we must place all our hopes for the future--then
neither democracy nor library will have aught to fear. Democracy will have
its "true and laudable" service from the library, and the library in its
turn will have adequate sympathy, aid and support from the people.
It is no accident that I make this appeal for sympathy and aid to a club
composed of women. The bonds between the modern public library and the
modern woman's club have been particularly strong in this country. The two
institutions have grown up together, making their way against suspicion,
contempt and hostility, aided by the same public demand, and now, when
both are recognized as elements in the intellectual strength of our
nation, they are rendering mutual service. The club turns to the library
daily. Hitherto the library has turned to the club only in some
emergency--a bill to be passed, an appropriation to be made, an
administration to be purified. I have tried to show you how, apart from
these great services, which no one would think of minimizing, the women of
this country, as citizens, can uphold the hands of the library daily. Ours
is a government of public opinion, and in the formation of that opinion
there is no more powerful element than the sentiment of our women,
especially when organized in such bodies as yours.
"To be aristocratic in taste and democratic in service," says Bliss Perry,
"is the privilege and glory of the public library." In appealing thus to
both your aristocracy and your democracy, I feel, then, that I have not
gone astray.
SOME TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN THOUGHT[13]
[13] Read before the New York Library Association at Squirrel Inn,
Haines Falls, September 28, 1915.
The modern American mind, like modern America, itself, is a melting pot.
We are taking men and women of all races and fusing them into Americans.
In the same way we are taking points of view, ideas, standards and modes
of action from whatever source we find them, combining them and fusing
them into what will one day become American thoughts and standards. We are
thus combining the most varied and opposing things--things that it would
seem impossible to put together. Take our modern American tendency in
government, for instance. Could there be two things more radically
different than despotism and democracy?--the rule of the one and the rule
of the many? And yet I believe that we are taking steps toward a very
successful combination of the two. Such a combination is essentially
ancient. No despotism can hold its own without the consent of the
governed. That consent may be unwilling and sooner or later it is then
withheld, with the result that a revolution takes place and the despot
loses his throne--the oldest form of the recall. Every despotism is thus
tempered by revolution, and Anglo-Saxon communities have been ready to
exercise such a privilege on the slightest sign that a despotic tendency
was creeping into their government.
It is not remarkable, then, that our own Federal government, which is
essentially a copy of the British government of its day, should have
incorporated this feature of the recall, which in England had just passed
from its revolutionary to its legal stage. It was beginning to be
recognized then that a vote of the people's representatives could recall a
monarch, and the English monarchy is now essentially elective. But to make
assurance doubly sure, the British government, in its later evolution, has
been practically separated from the monarch's person, and any government
may be simply overthrown or "recalled" by a vote of lack of confidence in
the House of Commons, followed, if need be, by a defeat in a general
election. We have not yet adopted this feature. Our President is still the
head of our government, and he and all other elected Federal officers
serve their terms out, no matter whether the people have confidence in
them or not. But the makers of our Constitution improved on the British
government as they found it. They made the term of the executive four
years instead of life and systematized the "recall" by providing for
impeachment proceedings--a plan already recognized in Britain in the case
of certain administrative and judicial officers.
As it stands at present we have a temporary elective monarch with more
power, even nominally, than most European constitutional monarchs and more
actually than many so-called absolute monarchs such as the Czar or the
Sultan. In case he should abuse the power that we have given him, he may
be removed from office after due trial, by our elected representatives.
In following out these ideas in later years, we are gradually evolving a
form of government that is both more despotic and more democratic. We are
combining the legislative and executive power in the hands of a few
persons, hampering them very little in their exercise of it, and making it
possible to recall them by direct vote of the body of citizens that
elected them. I think we may describe the tendency of public thought in
governmental matters as a tendency toward a despotism under legalized
democratic control. It may be claimed, I think, that the best features of
despotism and democracy may thus be utilized, with a minimum of the evils
of each.
It was believed by the ancients, and we frequently see it stated today,
that the ideal government would be government by a perfectly good despot.
This takes the citizens into account only as persons who are governed, and
not as persons who govern or help to govern. It is pleasant, perhaps, to
have plenty of servants to wait upon one, but surely health, physical,
mental and moral, waits on him who does most things for himself. I once
heard Lincoln Steffens say: "What we want is not 'Good Government'; it is
_Self_-Government." But is it not possible to get the advantage of
government by a few, with its possibilities of continuous policy and its
freedom from "crowd-psychology," with its skillful utilization of expert
knowledge, while admitting the public to full knowledge of what is going
on, and full ultimate control of it? We evidently think so, and our present
tendencies are evidence that we are attempting something of the kind. Our
belief seems to be that if we elect our despot and are able to recall him
we shall have to keep tab on him pretty closely, and that the knowledge of
statecraft that will thus be necessary to us will be no less than if we
personally took part in legislation and administration--probably far more
than if we simply went through the form of delegating our responsibilities
and then took no further thought, as most of us have been accustomed to do.
Whether this is the right view or not--whether it is workable--the future
will show; I am here discussing tendencies, not their ultimate outcome.
But it would be too much to expect that this or any other eclectic policy
should be pleasing to all.
"The real problem of collectivism," says Walter Lippmann, "is the
difficulty of combining popular control with administrative power.... The
conflict between democracy and centralized authority ... is the line upon
which the problems of collectivism will be fought out."
In selecting elements from both despotism and democracy we are displeasing
the adherents of both. There is too much despotism in the plan for one
side and too much democracy for the other. We constantly hear the
complaint that concentrated responsibility with popular control is too
despotic, and at the same time the criticism that it is too democratic. To
put your city in the hands of a small commission, perhaps of a city
manager, seems to some to be a return to monarchy; and so perhaps it is.
To give Tom, Dick and Harry the power to unseat these monarchs at will is
said to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is. Only it is
possible that by combining these two poisons--this acid and this
alkali--in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities. At
any rate this would seem to be the idea on which we are now proceeding.
We may now examine the effects of this tendency toward eclecticism in
quite a different field--that of morals. Among the settlers of our country
were both Puritans and Cavaliers--representatives in England of two moral
standards that have contended there for centuries and still exist there
side by side. We in America are attempting to mix them with some measure
of success. This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tells
in his "American Commonwealth," who said that American women were
"_furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm_"--frightfully free and frightfully
pious! In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritan
standards. Of course those who do not understand what is going on think
that we are either too free or too pious. We are neither; we are trying to
give and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiency
and restraint where restraint is indicated. We have not arrived at a final
standard. We may not do so. This effort at mixture, like all our others,
may fail; but there appears to be no doubt that we are making it. To take
an obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, to
combine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity of
marriage. We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble,
there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than if
there are legal ways of dissolving it.
Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinary
conversation to infractions of the moral code that they treat as trivial.
They on the other hand are shocked when we talk of divorce for what they
consider insufficient causes. In the former case we seem to them
"frightfully pious"; in the latter, "frightfully free." They are right; we
are both; it is only another instance of our tendency towards eclecticism,
this time in moral standards.
In some directions we find that this tendency to eclecticism is working
toward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundred
different ones. Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in our
architecture. A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico,
has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any more
than he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird's nest for a
woodchuck hole.
But in an American city, especially where we have enough money to let our
architects do their utmost, we find streets where France, England, Italy,
Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the
European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to
his nerve-specialist. It seems all right to us, and it _is_ all right from
the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism. And
our other art--painting, sculpture, music--it is all similarly mixed. Good
of its kind, often; but we have not yet settled down to the kind that we
like best--the kind in which we are best fitted to do something that will
live through the ages.
We used to think for instance that in music the ordinary diatonic major
scale, with its variant minor, was a fact of nature. We knew vaguely that
the ancient Greeks had other scales, and we knew also that the Chinese and
the Arabs had scales so different that their music was generally
displeasing to us. But we explained this by saying that our scale was
natural and right and that the others were antiquated, barbaric and wrong.
Now we are opening our arms to the exotic scales and devising a few of our
own. We have the tonal and the semi-tonal scales and we are trying to make
use of the Chinese, Arabic and Hindu modes. We are producing results that
sound very odd to ears that are attuned to the old-fashioned music, but
our eclecticism here as elsewhere is cracking the shell of prejudice and
will doubtless lead to some good end, though perhaps we can not see it
yet.
How about education? In the first place there are, as I read the history
of education, two main methods of training youth--the individual method
and the class method. No two boys or girls are alike; no two have like
reactions to the same stimulus. Each ought to have a separate teacher, for
the methods to be employed must be adapted especially to the material on
which we have to work. This means a separate tutor for every child.
On the other hand, the training that we give must be social--must prepare
for life with and among one's fellow beings, otherwise it is worthless.
This means training in class, with and among other students, where each
mind responds not to the teacher's alone but to those of its fellow
pupils.
Here are two irreconcilable requirements. In our modern systems of
education we are trying to respond to them as best we may, teaching in
class and at the same time giving each pupil as much personal attention as
we can. The tutorial system, now employed in Princeton University, is an
interesting example of our efforts as applied to the higher education.
At the same time, eclecticism in our choice of subjects is very manifest,
and at times our success here seems as doubtful as our mixture of
architectural styles. In the old college days, not so very long ago,
Latin, Greek, and mathematics made up the curriculum. Now our boys choose
from a thousand subjects grouped in a hundred courses. In our common
schools we have introduced so many new subjects as to crowd the
curriculum. Signs of a reaction are evident. I am alluding to the matter
here only as another example of our modern passion for wide selection and
for the combination of things that apparently defy amalgamation.
What of religion? Prof. George E. Woodberry, in his interesting book on
North Africa, says in substance that there are only two kinds of religion,
the simple and the complex. Mohammedanism he considers a simple religion,
like New England Puritanism, with which he thinks it has points in common.
Both are very different from Buddhism, for instance. Accepting for the
moment his classification I believe that the facts show an effort to
combine the two types in the United States. Many of the Christian
denominations that Woodberry would class as "simple"--those that began
with a total absence of ritual, are becoming ritualized. Creeds once
simple are becoming complicated with interpretation and comment. On the
other hand we may see in the Roman Catholic Church and among the so-called
"High Church" Episcopalians a disposition to adopt some of the methods
that have hitherto distinguished other religious bodies. Consider, for
example, some of the religious meetings held by the Paulist Fathers in New
York, characterized by popular addresses and the singing of simple hymns.
As another example of the eclectic spirit of churches in America we may
point to the various efforts at combination or unity, with such results as
the Federation of the Churches of Christ in America--an ambitious name,
not yet justified by the facts--the proposed amalgamation of several of
the most powerful Protestant bodies in Canada, and the accomplished fact
of the University of Toronto--an institution whose constituent colleges
are controlled by different religious denominations, including the Roman
Catholic Church. I may also mention the present organization of the New
York Public Library, many of whose branch libraries were contributions
from religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and the
Episcopalians. All these now work together harmoniously. I know of nothing
of this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified in
crediting it to the present American tendency to eclecticism.
Turn for a moment to philosophy. What is the philosophical system most
widely known at present as American? Doubtless the pragmatism of William
James. No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regarding
philosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; but
pragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system. It is based on the
character of results. Is something true or false? I will tell you when I
find out whether it works practically or not. Is something right or wrong?
I rely on the same test. Now it seems to me that this is the scheme of the
peasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Juno
or Egyptian Isis or Phoenician Moloch, so long as he got what he wanted.
If a little bit of Schopenhauer works, and some of Fichte; a piece of
Christianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill of
pragmatism. Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true. I am
not criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely asserting
that it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue in
the United States.
It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a list
of all the domains in which this eclecticism--this tendency to select,
combine and blend--has cropped out among us Americans of today. I have
reserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested--the
Public Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree.
The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a
wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any
other part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users look
at us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under
the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our
extravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are
compelled to foot the bills for what we do. But the taxpayers do not seem
to mind. They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing. What
bothers them is that we do not try to do more. When we began timidly to
add branch libraries to our system they asked us why we did not build and
equip them faster; when we placed a few books on open shelves they
demanded that we treat our whole stock in the same way; when we set aside
a corner for the children they forced us to fit up a whole room and to
place such a room in every building, large or small. We have responded to
every such demand. Each response has cost money and the public has paid
the bill. Apparently librarians and public are equally satisfied. We
should not be astonished, for this merely shows that the library is
subject to the same laws and tendencies as all other things American.
Hence it comes about that whereas in a large library a century ago there
were simply stored books with no appliances to do anything but keep them
safe, we now find in library buildings all sorts of devices to facilitate
the quick and efficient use of the books both in the building and in the
readers' homes, together with other devices to stimulate a desire to use
books among those who have not yet felt it; to train children to use and
love books; to interest the public in things that will lead to the use of
books. This means that many of the things in a modern library seem to an
old-fashioned librarian and an old-fashioned reader like unwarranted
extensions or even usurpations. In our own Central building you will find
collections of postal cards and specimens of textile fabrics, an index to
current lectures, exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room, with
free note-paper and envelopes, a class of young women studying to be
librarians, meeting places for all sorts of clubs and groups, civic,
educational, social, political and religious; a bindery in full operation,
a photographic copying-machine; lunch-rooms and rest-rooms for the staff;
a garage, with an automobile in it, a telephone switchboard, a paintshop,
a carpenter-shop, and a power-plant of considerable capacity. Not one of
these things I believe, would you have found in a large library fifty
years ago. And yet the citizens of St. Louis seem to be cheerful and are
not worrying over the future. We are eclectic, but we are choosing the
elements of our blend with some discretion and we have been able, so far,
to relate them all to books, to the mental activities that are stimulated
by books and that produce more books, to the training that instils into
the rising generation a love for books. The book is still at the
foundation of the library, even if its walls have received some
architectural embellishment of a different type.
When anyone objects to the introduction into the library of what the
colleges call "extra-curriculum activities," I prefer to explain and
justify it in this larger way, rather than to take up each activity by
itself and discuss its reasonableness--though this also may be undertaken
with the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the
United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own
being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You
can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply
drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit
to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so
doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing but fatigue, or
he may use the force of the stream, as far as he may, to reach his own
goal. I like to think that this is what many American institutions are
doing, our libraries among them. They are using the present tendency to
eclecticism in an effort toward wider public service. When, in a
community, there seems to be a need for doing some particular thing, the
library, if it has the equipment and the means, is doing that thing
without inquiring too closely whether there is logical justification for
linking it with the library's activities rather than with some others.
Note, now, how this desirable result is aided by our prevailing American
tendency toward eclecticism. Suppose precisely the same conditions to
obtain in England, or France, or Italy, the admitted need for some
activity, the ability of the library and the inability of any other
institution, to undertake it. I submit that the library would be extremely
unlikely to move in the matter, simply from the lack of the tendency that
we are discussing. That tendency gives a flexibility, almost a fluidity,
which under a pressure of this kind, yields and ensures an outlet for
desirable energy along a line of least resistance.
The Englishman and the American, when they are arguing a case of this
kind, assume each the condition of affairs that obtains in his own
land--the rigidity on the one hand, the fluidity on the other. They assume
it without stating it or even thoroughly understanding it, and the result
is that neither can understand the conclusions of the other. The fact is
that they are both right. I seriously question whether it would be right
or proper for a library in a British community to do many of the things
that libraries are doing in American communities. I may go further and say
that the rigidity of British social life would make it impossible for the
library to achieve these things. But it is also true that the fluidity of
American social life makes it equally impossible for the library to
withstand the pressure that is brought to bear on it here. To yield is in
its case right and proper and a failure of response would be wrong and
improper.