The Library and Society Part 28

Waltham, Ma.s.s., has taken a step in the right direction. The trustees of the public library have supplied two tables in their waiting room with Wide awake and St. Nicholas for the children.

Lowell, Ma.s.s., admits children during the day, and supplies them with juvenile magazines. Manchester, N.H., admits children to the reading-room; but unfortunately, from various causes, they are unable to offer the necessary attractions, and few visit it.

Newport, R.I., can only furnish St. Nicholas for want of money, but children may come and go at their pleasure.

Olneyville, R.I., is offering every inducement that their means will allow to draw children to their reading-room; and to interest and instruct them seems to be the object of those in charge.

Willimantic, Conn., admits children at the age of 12 years.

Somerville, Ma.s.s., supplies juvenile magazines, and has no limit to age.

Springfield, Ma.s.s., also admits children at all ages.

The Boston Public Library, the parent of the public libraries of New England, true to its paternal instinct, begins to exert its influence over the children at the earliest years.

There are doubtless others from whom we would be glad to hear, but I confess that, after visiting and inquiring among public libraries concerning this work, I became disheartened and ceased investigation, for the popular verdict seems to be "Children and Dogs not allowed."

With our experience in this work with the children since the opening of our library in 1876, and knowing the possibilities only waiting for development, I am emboldened to speak earnestly.

Let us gather the children in; give "milk for babies," in the ill.u.s.trated books which they may understand though they cannot read; juvenile magazines and literature of a healthy nature to counteract the pernicious trash that is flooding our communities.

It is only necessary to refer you to the specimens of flash literature which our boys have relinquished to us, with pale faces and trembling hands, after reading from the sc.r.a.pbook here on exhibition the cuttings from the newspapers of the day showing the bad influence of the dime novel. It tells its own story far better than I can tell it, and the one in whose mind this great remedial agent originated is daily blest in seeing the good results of his experiment.

Help the children to begin early to understand that even they are of use in a community; awaken their pride and ambition in the right direction, and their future is a.s.sured.

If there are those who doubt the practicability of this work, and, like Hosea Bigelow, would

"Give more for one live bobolink Than a square mile of larks in printer's ink,"

come and see our "Flower Band," numbering 200 children, gathered from the little girls and boys who frequent our library and reading-room, from five years of age to fourteen; from the little fellow who brings three wilted daisies, or a rose without a stem, to the dainty miss with a bouquet from the greenhouse.

Their badges signify a pledge to bring flowers once a week (if possible), and to respond to a call to distribute them in any place where they will add a bit of brightness to a shadowed household; also to seek out such homes and report them. Several names have been already stricken from our list, of those who have died leaving a blessing for these little missionaries.

The influence of this work upon the children and the community cannot be told. It must be seen to be appreciated.

I have endeavored to show that upon the influence of the public library working in harmony with the spirit of the churches and the schools, with the single object of the highest welfare of the people, depends much of the prosperity, morality, and culture of our industrial communities--I might also say of our country; but when we consider that there are less than 6,000 public libraries in the United States, are we not tempted to say in the words of old, "What are they among so many?"

But let us remember that the same spirit that gave power to feed the mult.i.tude from the "five loaves and fishes" still lives in the hearts of men to animate them to good works, as shown by Messrs. Ames, Hail, Pratt, Carnegie, Osterhout, Newberry, and a host of others whose names are yet to be engraved as public benefactors on the tablets of public libraries.

May G.o.d speed the work!

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS OF JOSEPH N. LARNED

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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sociation, 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.surance 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, a.s.sociations, 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 const.i.tuted. 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 regime 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sc.u.m 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 appet.i.tes. 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 appet.i.te as diseased and as shamefully pandered to as the appet.i.te 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumption 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.

THE LIBRARY AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE

What a librarian may do to direct the attention of his readers to the really great writers and thinkers--a plea for original work and for innovation in the library--a note frequently heard in 1920, but new in 1899 when Mr. Foss, librarian and popular poet, sounded it in _Public Libraries_ for March.