Part 5
This was written in 1865. Since then the rim of the Mediterranean has sent its enormous contribution of unskilled and unlettered human beings to the New World. There have been three great tides of migration from overseas. The first came to secure liberty of conscience; the second sought liberty of political thought and action; the third came in quest of bread. And of the three, incomparably the greater problem of assimilation is that presented by the last comers. Inextricably interwoven are all the complexities which face the great and growing municipalities, politically and industrially and socially. These are the awful problems of congestion and festering slums, of corruption in public life, of the exploitation of womanhood, of terrible struggle with wretchedness and poverty. Rightly directed, the native qualities and strength of these peoples will bring a splendid contribution in the making of a virile citizenship. Wrongly shaped, their course in the life of the city may readily become of sinister import. Frequently they are misunderstood, and they easily misunderstand. The problem is one of education, but it is that most difficult problem, of education for grown-ups. Here perhaps the library may render the most distinct service, in that it can bring to them in their own tongues the ideals and the underlying principles of life and custom in their adopted country; and through their children, as they swarm into the children's rooms, is established a point of contact which no other agency could so effectually provide.
Under the repressive measures of old-world governments, the racial culture and national spirit of Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Balkan Slavs, and Russian Jews have been stunted. Here both are warmed into life and renewed vigor, and in generous measure are given back to the land of their adoption. Such racial contribution must prove of enormous value, whether, as many sociologists believe, this country is to prove a great melting pot for the fusing of many races, or whether as Dr. Zhitlowsky contends, there is to be one country, one set of laws, one speech, but a vast variety of national cultures, contributing each its due share to the enrichment of the common stock.
IX
Great changes have come about in the methods that obtain for the exercise of popular government. In a democracy whose chief strength is derived from an intelligent public opinion, the sharpening of such intelligence and enlargement of general knowledge concerning affairs of common concern are of paramount importance. Statute books are heavily cumbered with laws that are unenforced because public opinion goes counter to them. Nonenforcement breeds disrespect for law, and unscientific making of laws leads to their disregard. So the earliest attempts to find a remedy contemplated merely the legislator and the official, bringing together for their use through the combined services of trained economists and of expert reference librarians the principles and foundation for contemplated legislation and the data as to similar attempts elsewhere. Fruitful as this service has proved within the limitation of state and municipal officialdom, a broadened conception of possibilities now enlarges the scope of the work to include citizen organizations interested in the study of public questions, students of sociology, economics and political science, business men keenly alive to the intimate association--in a legitimate sense--of business and politics, and that new and powerful element in public affairs which has added three million voters to the poll lists in ten states, and will soon add eleven million voters more in the remaining thirty-eight. The new library service centering in state and municipal legislative reference libraries, and in civic departments of large public libraries, forecasts the era, now rapidly approaching, when aldermen and state representatives will still enact laws and state and city officials will enforce them, but their making will be determined strictly by public opinion. The local government of the future will be by quasi-public citizen organizations directing aldermen and state legislators accurately to register their will. When representative government becomes misrepresentative, in the words of a modern humorist, democracy will ask the Powers that Be whether they are the Powers that Ought to Be. To intelligently determine the answer, public opinion must not ignorantly ask.
X
This has been called the age of utilitarianism. Such it unquestionably is, but its practicality is not disassociated from idealism. The resources of numberless commercial enterprises are each in this day reckoned in millions, and their products are figured in terms of many millions more, as once thousands represented the spread of even the greatest of industries. But more and more business men are coming to realize that business organization as it affects for weal or woe thousands who contribute to their success, must be conducted as a trust for the common good, and not merely for selfish exploitation, or for oppression. As the trade guilds of old wielded their vast power for common ends, so all the workers gave the best at their command to make their articles of merchandise the most perfect that human skill and care could produce. Men of business whose executive skill determines the destinies of thousands in their employ, are growing more and more to an appreciation of the trusteeship that is theirs. A humane spirit is entering the relationship between employer and employed. Great commercial organizations are conducting elaborate investigations into conditions of housing, sanitation, prolongation of school life, social insurance and similar subjects of betterment for the toilers; but a brief span ago they were concerned chiefly with trade extension and lowering of wages, all unconcerned about the living conditions of their dependents. They too are now exemplifying the possession of that constructive imagination which builds large and beyond the present. For results that grow out of experience and of experiment they also are in part dependent upon the sifted facts that are found in print. The business house library is a recent development, and in ministering in different ways to both employer and employed, gives promise of widespread usefulness.
XI
With the tremendous recent growth of industrialism and the rapid multiplication of invention, the manifest need for making available the vast sum of gathered knowledge concerning the discoveries of modern science has evolved the great special libraries devoted to the varied subdivisions of the subject. Munificently endowed as many of them are, highly organized for ready access to material, administered to encourage use and to give expert aid as well, their great importance cannot be overestimated. What they accomplish is not wholly reducible to statistics, nor can their influence be readily traced, perhaps, to the great undertakings of today which overshadow the seven wonders of antiquity. But there can be no question that without the opportunities that here lie for study and research, and--no less important--without the skilled assistance freely rendered by librarian and bibliographer, special talent would often remain dormant and its possessor unsatisfied. Greater here would be the loss to society than to the individual.
XII
Thus the libraries are endeavoring to make themselves useful in every field of human enterprise or interest; with books of facts for the information they possess; with books of inspiration for the stimulus they give and the power they generate. Conjointly these yield the equipment which develops the constructive imagination, without which the world would seem but a sorry and a shriveled spot to dwell upon. The poet and the dreamer conceive the great things which are wrought; the scientist and the craftsman achieve them; the scholar and the artist interpret them. Thus associated, they make their finest contribution to the common life. The builders construct the great monuments of iron and of concrete which are the expression of this age, as the great cathedrals and abbeys were of generations that have passed. Adapted as they are to the needs of this day, our artists and our writers have shown us the beauty and the art which the modern handiwork of man possesses. With etcher's tool one man of keen insight has shown us the art that inheres in the lofty structures which line the great thoroughfares of our chief cities, the beauty of the skylines they trace with roof and pediment. With burning words another has given voice to machinery and to the vehicles of modern industry, and we thrill to the eloquence and glow of his poetic fervor.
"Great works of art are useful works greatly done," declares Dr. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, and, rightly viewed, the most prosaic achievements of this age, whether they be great canals or clusters of workmen's homes worthily built, or maybe more humble projects, have a greatness of meaning that carries with it the sense of beauty and of art.
In medieval days, the heralds of civilization were the warrior, the missionary, the explorer and the troubadour; in modern times, civilization is carried forward by the chemist, the engineer, the captain of industry, and the interpreter of life--whether the medium utilized be pen or brush or voice. Without vision, civilization would wither and perish, and so it may well be that the printed page shall serve as symbol of its supreme vision. Within the compass of the book sincerely written, rightly chosen, and well used are contained the three chief elements which justify the library of the people--information, education, recreation.
The urge of the world makes these demands; ours is the high privilege to respond.
LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN[11]
It is amid conditions that call for heroic effort that the public library of today must do its work with children. There are not wanting critics who decry some present-day tendencies. They saw that when librarians seek the children in their homes to form groups of readers, they encroach upon the domain of the settlement worker. They complain that the story hour, now so widely developed, is an invasion of the kindergarten; they view with alarm the use of the stereo-scope and stereopticon as being outside the legitimate domain of the institution. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps they are wrong; maybe they are both right and wrong. If the purposes sought by these means were adequately ministered to from other sources, it may well be questioned whether the library would be justified in adopting these methods. In the admitted lack of agencies to meet these conditions, the children's librarian may find satisfaction in the results obtained, even if some folks' notions of legitimate library work are sadly jolted, as in the time to come they will certainly have to be modified. At best, the library and all allied agencies are struggling against tremendous odds in counteracting subtle influences for evil and open influences that breed coarseness and vulgarity. To operate a moving-picture show within the sacred precincts of a library may be counter to the accepted view of the fitness of things, but those who have visited the children's department of the Cincinnati Public Library will recall with a glow of pleasure the sight of the interested group of children awaiting each his turn at the machine to go on a tarry-at-home journey to Switzerland and France and other countries over-sea. Would the critics prefer to have the children glue their faces to the glass in the vulgar and suggestive shows of the penny arcade? The craving for novelty and amusement will not be denied. The instinct for dramatic action is inherent. It is said that there are 5,000 penny arcades and nickelodeons in New York City alone, with an average daily attendance of 300,000 children, and scarce a hamlet in all this wide country that does not foster one or two of them, a large proportion of them supplied with pictures of doubtful propriety.
The average penny arcade is closely linked with the Sunday comic supplement and the yellow-backed pamphlet in the vulgarization and decadence that threatens to overwhelm the youth of the country. Parents who would be horrified to note in the hands of their children any specimen of dime novel literature, complacently turn over to them on Sunday morning the sheet splashed with daubs of red and yellow and green that serve to render attractive the accompanying pictures and their slangy explanations. The Sunday comic supplement has done more to debase and to brutalize what is fine in boys and girls, to debauch their sense of fairness, to blunt their ideas as to what is manly and fair, to deaden their respect for age and authority, to prevent such aesthetic sense as they may have had, than can be counteracted by all the attempts being made by school, church, museum and library to stimulate a taste for better things. There is no escape from these colored atrocities. Millions enter the households weekly, they are scattered broadcast in parks and on the streets, they are left upon the seats of railway trains and street cars--they are everywhere. Parental effort is powerless. In a few households they are ruthlessly barred, but the neighbors' children are willing to share without demur. In an address before the American Playgrounds Congress, recently held in New York City, Miss Maud Summers uttered a warning against this pernicious fostering of deceit, cunning, and disrespect for age.
"The child of sensible parents will not see or know about them," Mr. Lindsay Swift wrote in a contribution to _The Printing Art_ two years ago, "but the child of the street, the child of the indifferent household, will warm to them like a cat to the back of the stove. There are certain negative results that parents have a right to expect from every educative force which is brought to bear on their children; that these children shall not be deliberately taught disrespect for old age or for physical infirmities and deformities; that they shall not learn to cherish contempt for other races or religions than their own; that they shall not take satisfaction in the tormenting of animals or weaklings--in short, that they shall not acquire an habitually cynical and unsportsmanlike attitude of mind. A morbid gloating over the deficiencies and humiliations of our neighbors is pretty sure to develop vulgarity and a lax moral fibre in ourselves; for vulgarity of mind and manners seems to me to be primarily a lack of restraint in thought, feeling, and expression regarding those tendencies which every civilized man and race is striving to modify or to conquer."
Doubtless, when first this medium for purveying humor was devised, the tendencies now so apparent were minimized. There were, in some of the earlier attempts, real humor and some skill of pencil, but the pictures have degenerated until they cry aloud for suppression.
There need be no apology for the story hour. A good story well told makes for pleasure, makes for morals, makes for intellectual growth. Most librarians defend it on the ground that the telling of the story leads to the reading of books on related topics. To my mind, no such defense or even explanation is needed. The story, if well chosen and fittingly told, justifies the teller and the tale. It is a moot question in educational circles whether the ear is a better medium for receiving impressions than is the eye. Some school-masters aver that there are ear-minded children and there are eye-minded children. A good story, well told, is worthy of being counted in the circulation statistics as many times as there are children to hear it, and far worthier to so figure than many a book that is taken out on a card and leaves as faint and as durable an impression on the reader's mind as footsteps on the shifting sand. And the more the storyteller can lead back the mind of childhood to the heart of childhood, the tales of wonder and of myth that grew to fulness when the race was young, the greater the service and the more fruitful in giving the listener something that will endure.
Neither is there need for apology in the exploitation of home library groups. At best, these can but partially counteract the flood of cheap and decadent literature of the most depraved character that circulates secretly among boys and girls. In Buffalo, recently, the public library has found among the people of foreign birth a mass of material in circulation whose bad quality has surprised even the librarians. The home groups that are being formed in some of the larger cities find an opening wedge among people of foreign birth whose reading has been practically confined to stuff of this sort. The reports from Germany would hardly seem credible were they not vouched for by the Durer Union, whose campaign against the growing tendency to read trashy literature has unearthed these facts. In a statement issued by its secretary, the astounding declaration is made that 8,000 established booksellers and 30,000 peddlers were engaged in selling sensational serials and books containing complete tales of a very low order.
No fewer than 750,000 of these wretched stories have been sold in the course of a single year. They are hawked from house to house, from factory to factory, outside schools, and among the peasants on every farm throughout the empire. The peddlers nearly always enter by the back door or the kitchen stairs. Servant girls and ignorant peasantry are the most fruitful customers, but it is asserted by municipal officials that even people who are in receipt of poor relief often deprive themselves of necessities in order to save two cents for a vile rehash of the sensationally embellished details of a notorious crime.
The extent of the literature of the streets obtainable in this country is little appreciated. An investigation, instituted several years ago by the Library Commission of one of the Middle West states, demonstrated the existence of tons of it on the upper and back-row shelves of news stands in all the larger cities, and in many of the villages and hamlets as well.
The desire to show a large circulation has made many librarians yield to the tyranny of statistics, and some errors of library administration are attributable to this cause. While it is undoubtedly true that the chief function of the library is to distribute as many wholesome books as possible, among the people, the totals of circulation are of vastly inferior importance to some facts that are not susceptible of being arranged in statistical uniform. And this is more particularly true of children's reading. It is less a question of how many books are read than what books are read and by whom they are read. It may well be urged that there is greater importance in the quality of the circulation than in the size of it--not how many, but how good, should be the earnest inquiry. It may well be doubted whether some children do not read more books than they can well assimilate. They are mentally profited about as much as their physical condition is nourished when they quaff quantities of soda water. They become troubled with mental dyspepsia.
Another criticism that is pertinent applies to book selection. There are too many books written especially for children. There are more titles in the average collection of children's books than the librarian ought to purchase. There are too many books that are negative in quality--pleasantly enough flavored, not harmful in tone, authentic as to facts, but colorless. There are usually too few of the world's enduring books--classics--and too many editions edited especially for children. Some of the children's catalogues are of appalling size. Here there is abundant need of excision. Five hundred titles, judiciously chosen and plentifully duplicated, would meet the need of most libraries, and would immeasurably raise the standard of reading. Much might be ascertained by an analysis of the individual cards of juvenile patrons--a sort of laboratory experiment.
There is need for greater co-operation between teachers and librarians. There are tendencies in teaching that are strangling rather than imparting the love of fine literature. It is no longer sufficient to give to the reader the music of lyric, the stir of epic--poetry must serve as an exercise in grammar. It is not sufficient that from virile prose the reader may obtain the glow of the writer's fancy or thought--it must do duty as a bit of sentence construction, or a companion piece to a lesson in geography or, perhaps, of history. We are told that poetry is dead. Who killed it? and how long would it take to do the like for prose?
Whatever of criticism as to plan and method may be rightfully made against public library work with children, the earnestness that underlies it all will, in the end, serve to eliminate the real causes for such criticism. Its meaning will unfold as time goes on--the first children's room opened in a public library dates back not much more than a dozen years. In the almonry of Westminster, three and one-half centuries ago, William Caxton chose carefully for his printing press, with deep reverence in his heart for the white souls upon which his characters would be printed as surely as upon the white paper before him. And with that same thought and care will be sifted, in the work that is being carried on now, the printed page that helps to mould and build the character of the newer generations.
TRAVELLING LIBRARIES[12]
Following in the wake of the great public library movement, which in less than two decades has dotted the cities of the United States with buildings that house millions of books for the people, came systems of traveling libraries. The institutions which Jenkin Lloyd Jones satirically terms Carnegeries, provide city dwellers with an amplitude of reading material, but there was until a few years ago no provision for similarly meeting the greater needs of the isolated persons living remote from centers of population--in thousands of little hamlets, in mining and lumber camps, in uncounted farmhouses.
Just fifteen years ago, Mr. Melvil Dewey, then state librarian of New York, ever foremost in progressive library work and originator of most of the far-reaching methods for making public libraries useful and efficient, solved the problem which had bothered many thinkers on the subject: How to give country people access to collections of books selected by experienced and educated buyers, and how to renew these collections so as to keep a fresh and plentiful supply on hand at all times. Mr. Dewey's solution of the problem was absurdly simple. Anybody could have thought it out without effort--but nobody else did. It was this: From a centrally administered library, groups of books carefully selected so as to comprise fifty or sixty volumes each, were packed into suitable boxes or cases, and sent to small villages, country schoolhouses, and centrally located farmhouses, to be distributed to the neighborhoods on the same plan as books are given out from branch stations in cities. At the end of six months, the books would be gathered by the custodian, shipped back to the central distributing agency, and a fresh lot would take their place. By this simple and economical method the people of these little neighborhoods would secure an opportunity to read the best and most interesting books without financial burden.
"In the work of popular education," said Melvil Dewey pertinently, "it is, after all, not the few great libraries, but the thousand small that may do most for the people."