Chapter 15

The trouble about this impression is that it is gained without knowledge of the facts. If a majority of the citizens, understanding how much work a modern public library is expected to do and how their own library does it, should deliberately conclude that its management was extravagant, and that its expenditure should be cut down, the minority would have nothing to do, as good citizens, but submit. The citizens have nothing to say as directly as this, but the idea, so generally held, that libraries are well off, does operate in the long run to limit library appropriations and to prevent the library from doing much useful work that it might do and ought to do.

It is then, every citizen's business, as I conceive it, to inform himself or herself of the work that the public library is doing, of that which it is leaving undone, and of the possibilities of increased appropriations. If the result is a realization that the library appropriation is inadequate, that realization should take the form of a statement that will sooner or later reach the ears, and tend to stimulate the action, of those directly responsible. And it should, above all, aid in the formation of a sound public opinion. Ours is, we are told, a government of public opinion. Such government will necessarily be good or bad as public opinion is based on matured judgment or only on fleeting impressions.

Inadequacy of support is responsible for more library delinquency than the average citizen imagines. Many a librarian is deservedly condemned for the unsatisfactory condition of his institution when his fault is not, as his detractors think, failure to see what should be done, or lack of ability to do it, so much as inability to raise funds to do it with. This is doubtless a fault, and its possessor should suffer, but how about the equally guilty accessories? How about the city authorities who have failed to vote the library adequate support? How about the board of trustees who have accepted such a situation without protest? And what is more to our purpose here, how about the citizens who have limited their efforts to pointing out the cracks in the edifice, with not a bit of constructive work in propping it up and making possible its restoration to strength and soundness?

In conversation with a friend, not long ago, I referred to the financial limitations of our library's work, and said that we could add to it greatly and render more acceptable service if our income were larger. He expressed great surprise, and said: "Why, I thought you had all the money you want; your income must be all of $100,000 a year." Now, our income actually is about $250,000, but how could I tell him that? I judiciously changed the subject.

Let us look next, if you please, at the library board and examine some of its functions. There appears to be much public misapprehension of the duties of this body, and such misapprehension assumes various and opposing forms. Some appear to think that the librarian is responsible for all that is done in the library and that his board is a perfunctory body. Others seem to believe that the board is the direct administrative head of the library, in all of its working details and that the librarian is its executive in the limited sense of doing only those things that he is told to do. Unfortunately there are libraries that are operated in each of these ways, but neither one relationship nor the other, nor any modification of either, is the ideal one between a librarian and his board. The board is supreme, of course, but it is a body of non-experts who have employed an expert to bring about certain results. They ought to know what they want, and what they have a right to expect, and if their expert does not give them this, the relation between him and them should terminate; but if they are men of sense they will not attempt to dictate methods or supervise details. They are the delegated representatives of the great public, which owns the library and operates it for a definite purpose. It is this function of the board as the representative of the public that should be emphasized here. Has the public a definite idea of what it wants from the public library, and of what is reasonable for it to ask? If so, is it satisfied that it is represented by a board that is of the same mind? The citizens may be assured that the composition of the library board rests ultimately upon its will. If the board is elective, this is obvious; if appointive, the appointing officer or body would hardly dare to go counter to the expressed desire of the citizens.

What has been said above may be put into a very few words. The public library is public property, owned and controlled by the citizens. Every citizen, therefore, should be interested in setting standards for it and playing his part toward making it conform to them--in seeing that its governing body represents him in also recognizing those standards and trying to maintain them--in laboring for such a due apportionment of the public funds as shall not make an attempt to live up to such standards a mere farce.

So much for the things that the citizen can and should do in his capacity of library boss. His possibilities as a beneficiary are still more interesting and valuable.

Perhaps you remember the story of the man who attempted to board the warship and, on being asked his business, replied, "I'm one of the owners." One version of the tale then goes on to relate how the sailor thus addressed picked up a splinter from the deck, and, handing it to the visitor, remarked: "Well, I guess that's about your share. Take it and get out!"

I have always sympathized with the sailor rather than with his visitor. Most of us librarians have had experiences with these bumptious "owners" of public property. The fact has already been noted that in a case like this the citizen is both an owner and a beneficiary. He has duties and privileges in both capacities, but he sometimes acts the owner in the wrong place. The man on the warship was doubtless an owner, but at that particular moment he was only a visitor, subject to whatever rules might govern visitors; and he should have acted as such. Every citizen is a part owner of the public library; he should never forget that fact. We have seen how he may effectively assert his ownership and control. But when he enters the library to use it his role is that of beneficiary, and he should act as such. He may so act and at the same time be of the greatest service to the institution which he, as a member of the public, has created and is maintaining.

I know of no way in which a man may show his good citizenship or the reverse--may either demonstrate his ability and willingness to live and work in community harness, or show that he is fit for nothing but individual wild life in the woods--better than in his use of such a public institution as a library. The man who cannot see that what he gets from such an institution must necessarily be obtained at the price of sacrifice--that others in the community are also entitled to their share, and that sharing always means yielding--that man has not yet learned the first lesson in the elements of civic virtue. And when one sees a thousand citizens, each of whom would surely raise his voice in protest if the library were to waste public money by buying a thousand copies of the latest novel, yet find fault with the library because each cannot borrow it before all the others, one is tempted to wonder whether we really have here a thousand bad citizens or whether their early education in elementary arithmetic has been neglected.

Before the present era there were regulations in all institutions that seemed to be framed merely to exasperate--to put the public in its place and chasten its spirit. There are now no such rules in good libraries. He who thinks there are may find that there is a difference of opinion between him and those whom he has set in charge of the library regarding what is arbitrary and what is necessary; but at any rate he will discover that the animating spirit of modern library authority is to give all an equal share in what it has to offer, and to restrain one man no more than is necessary to insure to his brother the measure of privilege to which all are equally entitled.

Another way in which the citizen, in his capacity of the library's beneficiary, can aid it and improve its service is his treatment of its administrators. Librarians are very human: they react quickly and surely to praise or blame, deserved or undeserved. Blame is what they chiefly get. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes not. But the occasions on which some citizen steps in and says, "Well done, good and faithful servant," are rare indeed. The public servant has to interpret silence as praise; so sure is he that the least slip will be caught and condemned by a vigilant public. No one can object to discriminating criticism; it is a potent aid to good administration. Mere petulant fault-finding, however, especially if based on ignorance or misapprehension, does positive harm. And a little discriminating praise, now and then, is a wonderful stimulant. No service is possible without the men and women who render it; and the quality of service depends, more than we often realize, on the spirit and temper of a staff--something that is powerfully affected, either for good or for evil, by public action and public response.

Years ago, at a branch library in a distant city, a reader stood at the counter and complained loudly because the library would not send her a postal reserve notice unless she defrayed the cost, which was one cent. The assistant to whom she was talking had no option in the matter and was merely enforcing a rule common, so far as I know, to all American public libraries; but she had to bear the brunt of the reader's displeasure, which she did meekly, as it was all in the day's work. The time occupied in this useless business spelled delay to half a dozen other readers, who were waiting their turn. Finally, one of them, a quiet little old lady in black, spoke up as follows: "Some of us hereabouts think that we owe a great debt of gratitude to this library. Its assistants have rendered service to us that we can never repay. I am glad to have an opportunity to do something in return, and it therefore gives me pleasure to pay the cent about which you are taking up this young lady's time, and ours." So saying, she laid the coin on the desk and the line moved on. I have always remembered these two points of view as typical of two kinds of library users. Their respective effects on the temper and work of a library staff need, I am sure, no explanation.

In what I have said, which is such a small fraction of what might be said, that I am almost ashamed to offer it to you, I have in truth only been playing the variations on one tune, which is--Draw closer to the library, as it is trying to draw closer to you. There is no such thing, physicists tell us, as a one-sided force. Every force is but one aspect of a stress, which includes also an equal and opposing force. Any two interacting things in this world are either approaching each other or receding from each other. So it should be with library and public. A forward movement on the one hand should necessarily involve one to meet it.

The peculiarity of our modern temper is our hunger for facts--our 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.