Again: Here is a man who does not read books. Is this because no book would appeal to him? Impossible! He may think so, but there lives no one to whom the soul of some fellow man, speaking through the printed page, will not bring a welcome message. Is there such a book on my shelves? If so, it is my business to get it into that man’s hands; if not, I must buy, beg or borrow it as soon as I may.

When the librarian has begun to talk in this fashion, lo! the dawn is shining, he is a librarian of to-day. The librarian of to-day frowns on no one, discourages no one; and he stands not passively at his door with open arms. He walks through his library; he walks through his town. He knows the books in one and the dwellers in the other, and he knows both in their relationships, actual and possible. If there are disused books on his shelves or non-readers in his community, it is not because he has made no effort to bring them together; his failures are not those of negligence.

The other day, sitting in a stalled trolley car, my eye fell upon a street-cleaner, and I began to watch him with interest. He was busy—apparently, I was going to say, but that does him injustice. He was really busy. While I watched him—and the car was delayed for some little time—he was constantly at work, pushing over the asphalt the broad scraper that was intended to rid it of dust and refuse. And yet he did not clean the street, for he took no account of the inequalities of its surface. These required intelligent adaptation of his movements at every instant, and to this he paid no attention. He went through the motions; his actual expenditure of physical energy was probably as great as if he had mixed a little brain-work with it, but it failed to accomplish what it ought, simply from that lack. And yet it would have been difficult for any overseer to give him orders that would have bettered the matter. It would have been hard to point out at any given instant, his errors of commission or of omission. The only way in which one could tell that he was not doing his work properly was by the result. He was put there to clean the street—and the street was not cleaned.

So with the librarians of yesterday and the day before. They are hard workers, not idlers. They have the tools, and they go through the motions. They may tire themselves out with their labor. Their library buildings may be attractive and clean; their technique perfect, their books well selected and in good order, their catalogs excellent. It is hard to point to any one thing that they are doing incorrectly or that they are omitting. And yet we must judge their work by its fruits; they are put into a community of actual or potential readers in charge of a collection of books. What are these for, if not to be read? Yet many remain untouched. For what purpose have the schools taught the townspeople to read? Thousands of them make no good use of that knowledge. To the librarian of to-day the non-realization of this and the lack of effort to remedy it mean failure. In order to make a little more definite our ideas of these three kinds of librarians, let us consider one or two very practical problems and see how each would probably view them and act upon them.

First. The library circulates no books on plumbing. For the librarian of the day before yesterday, this is no problem at all. Probably his library has no books on plumbing. His library is not for plumbers, and he has never suspected that it could be. As for the plumbers in his community, they too have never considered the possibility that they might learn something of their work from books in a public library. They are therefore silent and uncomplaining. Peace reigns and there is a general state of satisfaction all around—the satisfaction of blissful ignorance and of the day before yesterday.

The librarian of yesterday, on the other hand, sees the problem clearly and is concerned about it. He has good books on plumbing and nobody reads them. Evidently the more advanced grade of the librarian has not affected the plumbers—they still remain in ignorance of the public library. But what is he to do? Here is the library; here are the books; here is the librarian, ready and willing to distribute them to all who may come. If the generation—or any part of it—is so wicked and perverse that it comes not, what is there to do? What, indeed! And so library and community remain in the twilight of yesterday just before the dawn.

The librarian of to-day not only sees the problem and is concerned about it, but he proceeds to do something. Just what he does or how he does it is of far less consequence than the fact that he sees action in the matter to be necessary and possible. He may go personally and interview the plumbers; he may send them lists; he may get permission to address the plumbers’ union; he may do one or many of a thousand things to remedy matters, and although it is certain that what he does will not be completely effective, it is equally certain that it will have some good effect, which is the main thing.

Problem Second. Examination of the registry list shows that there are practically no card holders in a certain part of the town. As in the former case, this is no problem at all to the day before yesterday librarian. Its existence would in general not appear to him, certainly not as the result of any kind of statistical investigation. If he were informed of it he would regard the fact with complacency. The library is for readers, and if certain persons are non-readers they had better keep away. Nothing could be simpler. The librarian of yesterday, on the other hand, feels that all is not right. It is certainly too bad that when library privileges are offered free to all, so large a portion of the community should fail to take advantage of them. The library stands ready to help these people, if they will only come. Why don’t they?

The librarian of yesterday thus stops with a question; the librarian of to-day proceeds to answer it. He finds out why they don’t come. He may discover one or more of any number of things; whatever may be the causes, they are sure to be interesting, at least to him, for the to-day librarian is a born investigator. It may be that the non-readers are literate, but take no interest in books; perhaps they say they have no time to read; possibly the library has not the kind of books that they like; they may be foreigners, reading no English, and the library may have no books in their tongue. Whatever the trouble may be, the librarian of to-day sets about to remedy it. He may not succeed; but it is the diagnosis and the attempt at treatment, not its success, that constitute him what he is.

Problem Third. The reading done through the library is trivial and inconsequential. The fiction drawn is of low order, and there is little else read. The way in which this will affect the three types of librarian may be predicted at once. The librarian of the day-before-yesterday heeds it not; the librarian of yesterday heeds and perhaps worries, but does nothing. The librarian of to-day finds out the trouble and then tries to remedy it.

And so it goes: you may construct other problems for yourselves and imagine their solution, or lack of solution.

Now, it is obvious that there are great and evident objections to being a librarian of to-day and corresponding advantages in being one of the other kinds. In the first place the to-day variety of librarianship involves brainwork and it is always difficult to use one’s brain—we saw that in the case of the street-cleaner. Then this kind of librarian must be always looking for trouble. Instead of congratulating himself that all is going smoothly, he must set out with the premise that all cannot be going smoothly. There must be some way in which his books can be made to serve more people and serve them better; and it is his business to find out that way. Then the to-day librarian must use his statistics. The librarian of the day before yesterday probably takes none at all. The librarian of yesterday collects them with diligence, but regards any suggestion that they might be of use somewhat as the lazy wood-sawyer did the advice that he should sharpen his saw. “I should think I had a big enough job to cut up all this wood,” he replied petulantly, “without stopping to sharpen saws.” The librarian of yesterday has trouble enough in collecting and tabulating his statistics without stopping to use them—to make any deductions from them—to learn where the library machine is failing and where he should use the wrench or the oil can. All these things and many others make it easier for the overworked librarian to drop back into yesterday, or the day before. It should be borne in mind, however, that the difference between the three types of librarian is not so much difference in the amount of work done as it is in attitude of mind. The librarian of to-day does not necessarily expend more energy than the librarian of day before yesterday—but it is expended in a different direction and with a different object. It is to be feared that some librarians of small libraries allow themselves to become discouraged after reading of the great things that have been accomplished by large institutions with plenty of money to spend—the circulation of millions of books yearly, the purchase of additions by the tens of thousands, the provision of exhibitions for the children, the story-telling by professionals, the huge collections on special subjects, technology, art or history. It almost seems as if success were simply a matter of spending and as if without money to spend, failure should be expected as a matter of course.

On the contrary, all that the money does is to make possible success on a large and sensational scale—without the proper spirit and the proper workers the result might be failure on a scale quite as sensational. And an enthusiastic spirit, a high aim and unflagging energy—these are things that no money can buy and that will bring success on the small scale as on the large one.

We are fortunate—we who have charge of libraries and are trying to do something worth while with them—that there is perhaps less of the spirit of pure commercialism among us than among some other classes of workers. For this, in part, we have to thank our inadequate salaries. Persons who desire to work simply for the material reward will select some other field. We are glad to get our reward—we certainly earn it; but I venture to say that in the case of most of us there is also something in the work that appeals to us. And that something is the thing that, pushed to its furthest extent, will bring the dawn of to-day into the most backward library. It is not a very inspiring thing simply to sit down and watch a pile of books—hardly more so, I should think, than to take care of a pile of bricks or a load of turnips. Interest, enthusiasm, inspiration, come with realization of the fact that every one of those books has a mission and that it is the librarian’s business to find what it is and to see that it is performed. In the large, wealthy institution this duty may be accompanied by the expenditure of vast sums, and may be performed with the aid of things that only large sums of money can buy; in the small library there may be but a single librarian and only a few dollars to spend. But, just as in the case of a city librarian with an ample salary, she has open to her the choice of those three types of librarianship—the day before yesterday, yesterday and to-day.

And how about the librarian of to-morrow? Perhaps it may be as well to leave him or her for future consideration; but I cannot help saying just a word. May it not be that in the days to come we shall have enough civic pride to do whatever we may find to do—in our libraries or anywhere else, not with our eyes fixed only upon the work itself, important as that may be, but with the broader viewpoint of its effect upon the whole community? May it not be that this librarian of to-morrow will ask not, “Will it raise my circulation?” or even “Will it improve the quality of my reading?” but “Will it better the reading that is done in this community?” That librarian will not rejoice that his library circulation of good novels has dropped, when he realizes that twice as many bad novels are bought and read outside. He will be pleased that the children in his library have learned to wash their hands, but chiefly because he hopes that what they have learned may react upon the physical cleanliness—and perhaps on the moral cleanliness, too—of the community. Much as he will love the library, he will love it as an agency for the improvement of the community in which he lives and works, and he will do nothing for its aggrandizement, expansion or improvement that involves a change of the community in the opposite direction. We shall not see one library rejoicing because it has enticed away the users of some other library; we may even see a library rejoicing that it has lost its readers in Polish history, we will say, when it becomes known that they have gone to another library with a better collection in that subject.

I confess that I am looking forward to the day when we shall take this view—when the adage “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” may be forgotten among institutions in the same town. The policy that it represents makes for high speed, perhaps, but not for solidarity. In a fight such as we are waging with the forces of ignorance and indifference we should all keep shoulder to shoulder. This is why the librarian should say: “I am a citizen; nothing in this city is without interest to me.” That is why he should be a librarian of to-day, and why he may even look forward with hopefulness to the dawn of a still better to-morrow.

SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND MENTAL TRAINING

In the older methods the teacher, or rather his predecessors, decided what it would be necessary for the child to memorize, and then he was made to memorize, while still without appreciation of the need of so doing. We are perhaps in danger today of going to the other extreme. We require so little memorization by the student that the memory, as a practical tool of everyday life, is in danger of falling into disuse. It is surely possible for us to exercise our pupils’ memories, to develop them, and to control them, without giving them the fatal idea that memory is a substitute for thought, or that the assimilation of others’ ideas, perfect though it may be, will altogether take the place of the development of one’s own. There are still things that one must learn by heart, but since they must be retained below the threshold of consciousness, it is well that if possible they should also be acquired below that threshold. The problem of consciously learning a quantity of items of any kind and then relegating them to one’s subconsciousness in such a way that they will be available at any given time is not, of course, impossible. Most of us have at our disposal many facts that we have learned in this way; but I venture to assert that most of us have lost a large proportion of what we thus acquired. Now a man never learns by rote the names of his relations, the positions of the rooms in his house, the names of the streets in his town. He has acquired them subconsciously as he needs them. When the human mind becomes convinced of the need of information of this kind “in its business,” the acquiring comes as a matter of course. In a language, the paradigms may be learned unconsciously when the pupil sees that they are necessary in order to understand an interesting passage; the multiplication table and tables of weights and measures require no conscious memorization; or at least such memorization may be undertaken voluntarily as a recognized means to a desired end. I say these things may be done; I am sure that they are in many schools; I am equally sure that they were unheard of in my own boyhood; that is, as recognized methods in teaching. Of course, in spite of schools and teachers and methods, a vast amount of information and training has always been acquired in this way. I do not remember ever “learning to read” as a set task. I am sure that none of my children ever did so. We recognized the desirability of knowing how. We wanted to learn, and so we learned; that is all. Of course our teachers and parents and friends helped us along.

Is not this what the school is for—to make the pupil anxious to learn and then to help him? When all schools are conducted on this principle, we shall be very happy, but apparently it is not so simple as it would appear.

What we should try to approximate, at all events, is an emancipation from the thraldom of unwillingness on the part of the pupil—to bring it about that he shall desire to learn and will take what measures he can to do so, gladly availing himself of what help we can offer him.

I have said that what we need is to stimulate the pupil’s desire and then to satisfy it. I have known teachers who were competent to do both—who could take an ignorant, unwilling pupil and make of him an enthusiast, thirsting for knowledge, in a few weeks. We all know of the ideal university whose faculty consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a log. I am sorry the creator of that epigram put his teacher on a log. There are plenty of logs, and, from this fact, too many persons, I am afraid, have leaped to the conclusion that there are also plenty of Mark Hopkinses. I fear that one trouble with educators is that, hitching their wagons to stars, they have assumed the possibility that terrestrial luminaries also are able to raise us to the skies. If we had a million Mark Hopkinses and a million boys for them to educate, we should need only a sufficient quantity of logs; we should be forever absolved from planning school-houses and making out schedules, from writing textbooks and establishing libraries. As it is, we must do all these things. We must adopt any and all devices to arouse and hold the pupil’s interest, and we must similarly seek out and use all kinds of machinery to satisfy that interest when once aroused. Of these devices and machines, the individual teacher, with or without his textbooks, lectures, recitations, laboratory work, and formal courses, is only one, and perhaps in some cases not the one to be preferred as the primary agent. Among such devices I believe that a collection of books, properly selected, disposed, and used can be made to play a very important part, both in arousing interest in a subject and in satisfying it—in other words in teaching it properly.

And first let us see what it may do to stimulate a general interest in knowledge. Of late I have seen cropping out here and there what seems to me a pedagogical heresy—the thesis that no kind of training is of value in fitting the pupil for anything but the definite object that it has in view. We can, according to this view, teach a boy to argue about triangles, but this will not help him in a legal or business discussion. We may teach him to solve equations, and he will then be an equation-solver—nothing else. We may teach him to read Greek and he will then be some sort of a Greek scholar, but his reaction to other attempts to teach him will not be affected. Anything like a general training is a contradiction in terms. If this is true, a great part of what I am saying is foolish, but I do not believe it. Doubtless we have exaggerated the effect of certain kinds of training. The old college graduate who, having been through four years of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, considered himself able with slight additional training, to undertake to practice law or medicine or manage a parish, was probably too sanguine. Yet I refuse to believe that a man’s brain is so shut off in knowledge-tight compartments that one may exercise one part of it without the slightest effect on the others. I cannot now write with my toes, but I am sure that I could learn to do so much more quickly because I know how to use my fingers for the purpose.

And it is indubitable, I think, that the best general preparation for mental activity of whatever kind is contact with the minds of others—early, late, and often. It tones up all one’s reactions—makes him mentally stronger, quicker, and more accurate. Some children get this at home, where there is a numerous family of persons who are both thoughtful and mentally alert. Some meet at home, besides members of the family, visitors who add to the variety of their contacts. Few get it in school, with much variety. And it is futile to expect most of our children to get it anywhere directly from persons. This being the case, it is wonderfully fortunate that we have so many of the recorded souls of human beings between the covers of books. With them mental contacts may be numerous, wide, and easy. To interest a man in a stretch of country take him up to a height whence he may overlook it. There is a patch of woods, there a hill, there is a winding stream. He will see in imagination the wild flowers under the trees, the windswept rocks behind the hill, the trout in the stream. He will wonder, too, what unimagined things there may be and he will long to find out. To interest a pupil in a subject turn him loose in a room containing a hundred books about it. He will browse about, finding a dozen things that he understands and a hundred that he does not. He will get such a bird’s-eye view that his stimulated imagination will long for closer acquaintance. And if you want to interest him in the world of ideas in general, turn him loose in a general library. The things that he will get are not to be ascertained by an examination. They are intangible, but their results are not.

In an illuminating article on the events just preceding the present European war, Professor Munroe Smith holds that it was precipitated chiefly by bringing to the front at every step military rather than diplomatic considerations. The trouble with military men, he says, is that they take no account of “imponderables”—by which he means public opinion, national feeling, injured pride, joy, grief—all those things, intellectual and emotional, that cannot be expressed in terms of men, guns, supplies, and military position. I have been wondering whether some other technically trained persons—educators, for instance, do not tend toward a similar neglect of imponderables, measuring educational values solely in terms of hours, and units, and the passing of examinations. It is a fault common to all highly trained specialists. The Scripture has a phrase for it, as for most things—“ye neglect the weightier matters of the law—judgment and faith.” These, you will note, are to be classed with Professor Munroe Smith’s “imponderables,” whereas mint, anise, and cummin are commercial products.

At least one noted educator, William James, did not make this error, for he bids us note that the emotional “imponderable”—though he does not use this word—possesses the priceless property of unlocking within us unsuspected stores of energy and placing them at our disposal. “I thank thee, Roderick, for the word,” says Fitz-James in “The Lady of the Lake”: “it nerves my heart; it steels my sword.” One would hardly expect to find educational psychology in Scott’s verse, but here it is. The word that Roderick Dhu spoke (I forget just what it was, but I think he called his rival a bad name) unlocked in Fitz-James an unexpected store of reserve energy, and the result, as I recall it, was quite unfortunate from the Gaelic point of view. We cannot afford to neglect the imponderables; and it is their presence and their influence that are fostered by a collection of books. If you will add together the weight of leather, paper, glue, thread, and ink in a book you will get the whole weight of the volume. There is naught ponderable left; and yet what is left is all that makes the thing a book—all that has power to influence the lives and souls of men—the imponderable part, fit for the unlocking of energies.

I would not have you think, although I believe this to be at bottom a matter of principles, that it is not possible to apply these principles very directly and concretely in the daily practice of an educational institution. I desire to call your attention for a moment to the testimony of one who has had great experience and practice in the administration of a collection of books in such an institution and in their use for the purposes already outlined—Mr. Frederick C. Hicks, assistant librarian of Columbia University, New York City, from whose recent review article on this subject I propose to quote a few paragraphs. Mr. Hicks is writing primarily of college instruction, but, as he notes in the first paragraph that I shall quote, what he says applies with equal cogency to the secondary school. He writes:

This is essentially a teacher’s view. Listen now to that of a public librarian, Mr. John Cotton Dana, of Newark, New Jersey. He says:

I trust that you are with me so far; for I am about to make a further advance that experience teaches me is very difficult, except for librarians. I am going to urge that your collection of books, when you have made it, be put in charge of one who has studied the methods of making the contents of books available to the reader—their shelving, physical preparation, classification, cataloguing; the ways in which to fit them to their users, to record their use, and to prevent their abuse. This means a trained librarian.

In all departments where expert knowledge and skill are necessary it is difficult to explain to a non-expert the reasons for this necessity and exactly in what the expert knowledge consists. We are so accustomed to accept the fact in certain departments that it passes there without question. Unfortunately that is not the case with the selection and administration of a library. Most persons understand quite well that special training is necessary before one can practice law, or medicine, or engineering. No one would undertake to drive a motor car or even ride a bicycle without some previous experience; but it is quite usual to believe that a collection of books may be administered and its use controlled by totally untrained and inexperienced persons—a retired clergyman, a broken-down clerk, a janitor, perhaps. I once asked a young woman who came for advice about taking up library work what had inclined her toward that particular occupation. She was quite frank with me; she said: “Why, my father and mother didn’t think I was good for anything else.” This estimate of the library is by no means confined to the parents of would-be library workers. And even where it is recognized that some training and experience are necessary in administering a large public institution, there is a lingering feeling that a comparatively small collection, like that in a school, needs no expert supervision. The fact that there are in a school plenty of experts in other lines seems to have been not without its effect on this attitude. “Why, Professor Smith is one of the best chemists in the state; Miss Jones is an acknowledged authority on oriental history; do you mean to tell me that either of them would not make a perfectly satisfactory librarian?” Which is something like saying, “Mr. Robinson is our foremost banker; should he not be able to superintend the dyeing department in a textile mill?” Or, “Rev. Mr. Jenkins is our most eloquent pulpit orator; he can surely run the 2:15 express!”

Are my metaphors too violent? I think not. We are dealing here with imponderables, as I have said, but the most imponderable thing of all, and the most potent, is the human mind. To wield, concentrate, and control our battery of energies we want a correlated energy—one whose relations to them all are close and one who knows how to pull all the throttles, turn all the valves, and operate all the mechanism that brings them into play. It takes two years of hard work, nowadays, for a college graduate to get through a library school, and it should not be necessary to argue that during these two years he is working hard on essentials and is assimilating material that the untrained man however able, cannot possibly acquire in a few month’s casual association with a library or from mere association with books, no matter how long or how intimate. You will pardon me, I am sure, some further quotation from Mr. Hicks’s illuminating article. After calling our attention to the fact that the effort to meet changing conditions in instruction is purely technical, he goes on:

I like so much one of Mr. Hicks’s expressions that I desire to emphasize it at the close of what I am saying. A library, used for teaching purposes in a school, is indeed, “a composite textbook.” It insures contact with a composite instead of a single mind. The old idea was that contact of this kind always resulted in confusion—in mental instability. There was a time when the effort was to protect the mind through life from any such unbalancing contact. The individual was protected from familiarity with more than one set of opinions—religious, political, social, philosophical, scientific. He was taught facts as facts and no emphasis was placed on the more important fact that there are degrees of certainty and points of view. The next step was to give the individual a free head after the formal processes of education had terminated. Getting out of college was like escaping from a box, where one had been shut up with Presbyterians and Free Traders and Catastrophists and Hegelians—or their opposites, for the contents of all the boxes were not alike. Now, we set the boy free when he enters college and we are beginning to give him a little fresh air in the high school. Why not go back to the beginning? Why not, at any rate, avoid the implication that there is the same backing behind all that we teach or tell? Some teachers, and some parents, have made this plan succeed. One of them is Mr. H.R. Walmsley, who writes in the Volta Review (Washington, April, 1915), on “How I Taught My Boy the Truth.” Says he:

This plan is practicable from the child’s earliest years. As soon as he learns to read we may begin to supplement it by reference to original documents. This means a library at the very beginning, and at high school age it means a large library. It need not all be in the school. In the smallest towns there are now respectable public collections; the school may confine itself to the subjects in its own curriculum. But whatever we do, let us not teach the child, with the implication of equal authority, that twice two is is four, that material bodies are composed of molecules, and that the Tories in the Revolution were all bad. Tell him that there are other aspects, if they exist, and as soon as he is able let him examine those aspects. He will be able far sooner than some of us are willing to admit.

We librarians feel somewhat strongly on this matter because our own institutions possess by their very nature that form of neutrality that exposes both sides without advocating either. It seems to be assumed by some persons that neutrality means ignorance. Of course, ignorance is one method of insuring it. If a fairy story opens with the announcement that the King of Nowaria is at war with the Prince of Sumboddia, you cannot take sides until you know something about the quarrel. The trouble is that we do not live in fairyland. In my home city the school authorities have been trying to cultivate this kind of neutrality by cautioning principals not to discuss the European war with their pupils. What is the result? One of my branch librarians says in a recent report: “I have been greatly interested by the fact that the high-school boys and girls never ask for anything about the war. Not once during the winter have I seen in one of them a spark of interest in the subject. It seems so strange that it should be necessary to keep them officially ignorant of this great war because the grandfather of one spoke French and of another, German.” With this I thoroughly agree. I am not sure that I do not prefer a thorough and bigoted partisanship to this neutrality of ignorance. Better than both is the opportunity for free investigation with enlightened guidance. The public library offers the opportunity for the fullest and freest contact with the minds of the world. We try to give guidance, also, as we can; but we have not the opportunities of you teachers. Guidance is your business and your high privilege; and if some of you have in the past guided as the jailer guides his prisoners—for a walk around the prison yard with ball and chain—let us be thankful that this oppressive view is giving place to the freer idea of a guide as a counselor and friend. Such guidance means intellectual freedom. Freedom means choice, and choice implies a collection from which to choose. This means a library and the school library is thus an indispensable tool in the hands of those teachers to whom education signifies neutral training, the arousing of neutral energies, and a control of the imponderables of life—those things without physical weight which yet count more in the end than all the masses with which molecular physics has to deal.

THE LIBRARY AND THE BUSINESS MAN[16]

The electricians have a word that has always interested me—the word and the thing it signifies. It is “hysteresis,” and it means that quality in a mass of iron that resists magnetization, so that if the magnetizing force is a moving one the magnetism always lags a little behind it. We see this quality in many other places besides magnetic bodies—the almost universal tendency of effects to lag behind their causes. I like to watch it in the popular mind—the failure to “catch on” quickly—the appreciation that comes just a little after the thing to be appreciated. Lag everywhere, in apprehension, in knowledge, in the realization of a situation. Everywhere hysteresis. Of course, sometimes the lag is great and sometimes it is slight. It may be affected by physical distance, as when the European thinks that Indians camp in the suburbs of Pittsburg and that the citizens of Indianapolis hunt the buffalo of an evening; or it may be a function of mental distance, as when the Wall Street financier fondly imagines that this country is still populated chiefly by lambs, as it undoubtedly was fifty years ago. I like to watch it as it affects the idea of the public library as some people hold it. Now of course, without progress, change, motion of some kind, there could be no lag. In a permanent magnet there is no hysteresis. If the Indians and the buffalo were still with us, the European would be thinking the truth. If we had not learned that the gold-brick and the green goods were frauds, we could still be fleeced. And if libraries were still what they were fifty years ago, there would be no lag in the ideas that some people hold about them. Libraries have changed. Some of you know it and some of you do not. Libraries have changed in the kind of printed matter that they collect and preserve; in the kind of people to whom they make their appeal; in the way in which they try to make the former available to the latter. They have utterly changed in their own conception of their status in the community, of what they owe to the community and how they ought to go about it, to pay the debt.

The old library was first and foremost a collection of material for scholars; the new is for the busy citizen, to help him in what he is busy about, to make it possible for him to do more work in less time. It has taken some time for the library to see itself in this light, but it has taken the great body of our citizens still longer to recognize and act on the change—else I should not be talking to you to-day about the library and the business man. The modern library is concerned, much more largely than the old, with contemporary relations, with what is happening and what is just going to happen. It sympathizes with the men who do things. It tries to let them know what is going on about them, and to assist them in what they are attempting—whether it be to achieve a world-wide peace or to devise a new non-refillable bottle.

The library has placed itself in a position where it can do this better than any other institution, for it is essentially non-partisan. Probably it is our only non-partisan institution. Mr. Bryan’s impartial government newspaper has not yet printed its first number. The school must take sides, for its deals solely with children. The library alone can store up material on all sides of every mooted question and offer it to him who reads, without in any way taking sides itself. It may run the risk of misconception. We had a big exhibit of war pictures last year. The Pacifists protested. It was very dreadful, they said, to see a library encouraging the militaristic spirit. This year we have a peace exhibit—prepared by the Union Against Militarism. The Preparedness people are horrified. They hate to see a library siding with those who would drag our country in the dust of humiliation. The trouble with all these good people is just hysteresis—lag. It may have been fifty years ago that a portrait of a monarch in a library meant that the institution was for him, body and soul. Now it means simply that he is an interesting contemporary thing. Display of a cartoon representing Woodrow Wilson doing something disgraceful does not imply on our part detestation of the president, but only a willingness to let the public see a good bit of drawing or perhaps to show them how some part of the community is thinking and feeling. It is all a part of our efforts at up-to-dateness—our struggles to brush off the dust and sweep away the cobwebs of medievalism.

As an incident of these struggles, we have discovered the existence of the Business Man. We have tried to find out what he is driving at and to help a little—to stock the kind of information that he wants and to help him get at it. An obstacle in the way has been the fact that much of what he wants is to be obtained best from material that the older libraries knew nothing of and would have despised had they known it—partly, printed matter that had no existence in those days, like the huge trade catalog and the informative railway folder; partly material that was ignored because it had no connection with scholarly pursuits—time tables, statistical schedules, directories, lists of names and addresses, commercial publications, maps, information regarding trade-routes and conditions. If the scholar of fifty years ago wanted to be set right about a Greek preposition or to find the color of Henry VII’s hair, he knew where to go: the library was the proper and inevitable place for such data. He brushed the dust from a pile of books and proceeded to look them up. But if he wanted to know the quickest way to ship goods to Colombo, Ceylon, or the comparative exports of cereals from Russia during the last decade, or the design of the latest machine for effecting a given result, did he go to the library? Remember that this is supposed to be fifty years ago. I am afraid I must confess that I don’t know where he went. I fear that in most cases he didn’t go at all, for business men as well as libraries have grown in the last half century—but I am quite sure that he went nowhere near the library.

The reason was that printed information of this kind either did not then exist or was thought improper for collection by a scholarly institution. If anyone had asked for it I know what the librarian would have said, for the same thing is occasionally still said by librarians, and I hear it at department stores and everywhere else where there is distribution of objects necessary to our lives. They would have said—“There has been no demand for it, so we don’t need to keep it.” Demand for it! Of course not. Is there any demand for fish in a sand-bank or for free-trade arguments in a stand-pat Republican newspaper? People go for things where they know the things are to be found; and they knew well fifty years ago that none of these things were to be found in a library. The sad thing is that altho the libraries have reformed, hysteresis is still getting in its deadly work. There is a lag of apprehension and appreciation among our business men, many of whom think the library is still the same old dusty, cobwebby institution of 1850. Take my word for it, it is not. It stocks all the things that the librarian used contemptuously to call biblia abiblia—books that are no books—city directories by the hundred, trade maps, commercial information, trade catalogs, advertising folders, railway announcements, hundreds of things that will answer the questions that every business man wants, or ought to want, to know. We, or any other library, may not have precisely what you want. We are not yet perfect and we have much to learn. But we are buying and putting at the business man’s disposal the kind of material that will help him in his business.

The modern library is democratic, not autocratic. It does not hand you down a volume from a very high shelf and tell you that is exactly what you want and you mustn’t ask for anything else. It says: we are the agents of a co-operative concern. For convenience sake, just as in the case of the public schools, you conclude to tax yourselves to maintain a public collection of books, instead of having to form private collections of your own, smaller and vastly more expensive. We are in communication with every one of you by telephone. The machine for which you have paid is all ready to work—stoked and cleaned and oiled. Why don’t you press the button? Those who don’t are just suffering from hysteresis—lag of apprehension. They think the library is what it was in 1850. They are behind the times.

Am I not afraid that if all the business men should press the button at once, the library would be swamped? There would be a little swearing at first, I fear. But ultimately there would be a realization that a library built and stocked and manned to serve perhaps 50 business men at once cannot serve 500 or 5000. There would be pressure on the legislature; we should have the necessary funds and in short order we should be serving our 5000 as smoothly as we served our 50.

Now let us get down to something concrete. Just what information are we prepared to give to business and industrial houses? Here are some actual questions asked lately and answered in our reference departments—many of them by telephone: