Part 12

"Books are each a world; and those we know Are a substantial world both pure and good; Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow. And books are yours Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which for a day of need The Sultans hide deep in ancestral vaults. These stores of truth you can unlock at will."

BOOKS AND LIFE

The influence of books on the community has been used in this address by Dean (now President) Birge as a basis for discussing their reaction on special groups, especially those differentiated by age and sex, and how far the library should be guided by it and take advantage of it. It is perhaps the best general treatment of the group features of socialized library work by a speaker of authority, not a professional librarian.

Edward Asahel Birge was born at Troy, N.Y., Sept. 7, 1851, graduated at Williams in 1873 and since 1875 has been a member of the University of Wisconsin faculty, serving successively as instructor in natural history, professor of zoology, dean of the college of arts and sciences, acting president, and finally in 1919, president of the University. He has also served as a director of the Free Library at Madison, and in 1906 was president of the Wisconsin Library Association, before whom this address was delivered.

The aspect of the subject to which I would call your attention is the often observed fact of the extent to which modern life in all of its phases, is becoming based upon books. I say in all of its phases, for we are concerned with the present extent of this relation between books and life with its rapid increase, rather than with its existence. Ever since the beginning of human society men have based their actions on the teachings of experience. Part of these teachings each individual has directly derived from his environment, and he has supplemented and enlarged them by means of those coming from the remembered experience of others, often belonging to an older generation. Later in history there were added those teachings derived from books--from the recorded experience of others. With that enlargement of the basis of human action which comes from the remembered experience of others we, as librarians, have nothing to do, and, indeed, there is little to say about it now which could not have been said with equal propriety, one, two, or twenty centuries ago. With books the case is different. The last century, the last generation, the last decade--each has seen the transfer of the basis of action from the oral to the printed word, which could be paralleled by no other period of equal length in the history of civilization. The story of this transfer from talk to print, from rule of thumb to textbook, from tradition to school, from practise to science, is long and intensely interesting. I can touch only a few phases of it.

First consider the lengthening of the school period for children. I do not think it is possible accurately to compare the present length of this period with that which existed a century or a half ago; nor would such a comparison interest us. It is enough for our purpose to know that years have been added to the school life of many thousands of the youth of all classes. As a single illustration, consider the effect of the high school, whose development into a large and popular institution, an institution affecting great masses of the people, belongs almost wholly to the period within the life of the generation now on the stage. A half century ago the public high school was almost unknown and the private academy reached very few persons. Only a generation ago the number of students in secondary schools was hardly one-tenth of the present number. The attendance on institutions of secondary grade has thus increased five times as rapidly as the population. Within the past fifteen years the attendance in the high schools of Milwaukee has more than trebled, while only a little more than fifty per cent. has been added to the population of the city. In Racine almost exactly the same ratio holds, and so for many other cities of the United States, the increase being least marked in New England cities, and greatest in the cities of the West.

The formative influence of the high school youth are far more extensively and exclusively books than were those of his father or grandfather, who probably began to learn his trade, or his business, at about the age when his boy enters the high school, and who therefore, during the period of adolescence, received his training from action rather than from study, from oral rather than from printed experience.

One may find to-day in the writings of many teachers jeremiads over the shortness of the average school life of children. I would not contradict their statistics and would join in their regrets, but the fact remains that the most striking phenomenon in the life of the children of the past thirty years is the extent to which their training has been committed to the use of books and the rapid growth of the use of books as the period has advanced. Few as the school years of the children now are, those of any older generation have been fewer. This aspect of the matter is the one that is of interest to us, and the school life of the present, instead of arousing our regrets by its brevity, may well call out our astonishment by its length, and demand the use of our best wits to see the changes which have been caused in the life of the present and to forecast those which in the future will flow from this fundamental change in education.

One of these correlated changes is already apparent--the extension of the period of book learning for many thousands of persons into the college and university course.

In 1850 the total attendance on colleges in the United States was about ten thousand. Half a century later, when the population of the country had increased about three and one-third times, the college students had increased in a tenfold ratio, or more than three times as rapidly as the population. Even more significant is the growth of the number of college students in more recent years. Since 1889 the number has more than doubled, thus continuing in the latest years a ratio of growth with reference to population quite as great as in earlier years.

An equally significant, and quite as conspicuous change, is seen in the growth of technical education. Thirty years ago, when I came to Wisconsin, the university was graduating from two or three and a half dozen engineers yearly, and these could not all find occupation in this commonwealth, with a population then of more than a million people. Now a hundred graduates go out at Commencement, while the population of the state has little more than doubled, and while other engineering schools of high rank have multiplied all around it.

Nowadays the man of books, rather than the man of tradition is directing the work of the world. In the copper mines of the north the old-fashioned mine captain, who received his profession and his traditions from his father, is disappearing and has almost vanished. His place is taken by the graduate of a mining school, who interprets what he sees, not by the light of the experience of his elders, communicated to him orally, but by the far clearer light of the collective experience of men embodied in books.

When the capitalist now desires to explore for new iron mines he employs not the old-fashioned prospector, but puts into the field a party of young men often fresh from the geological laboratory. Thus science, organized knowledge, book learning, is driving out with increasing rapidity the picturesque figures of past times--times wholly past, though only just behind us in years. That "bookish theoric," so detested by Iago, is apparently firmly in control of affairs and has displaced its predecessors and rivals.

In countless other ways the same fact is shown. Half a century ago a youth who desired to become a lawyer or a doctor entered the office of a practitioner and learned his profession by practise and experience. Now he goes to the school of law or medicine and gains his entrance to his chosen calling by the way of books and laboratories. Even commerce and trade, in which the rules of practical experience seem most firmly entrenched, are shifting their basis to books, and schools of commerce and trade schools are springing up on every hand to give youth a broader foundation of knowledge than can be gained from practise. Still more significant are the facts shown by the enormous development of agricultural experiment stations, farmers' bulletins and farmers' institutes. Agriculture, that calling which of all others is most ancient and most conservative, is rapidly changing its basis from tradition to books. Perhaps I ought not to say "most conservative," for there is one calling which may better deserve the title--that of the domestic industries practised by women. Yet even here a beginning of the transfer, although a small one, has been made by schools of domestic science.

While this beginning is but small, and while the traditional professions of women have not yet been greatly modified by books, the life of no class of the community has been more profoundly affected by this general change than has that of women. With the passing away of home industries and with the great increase of wealth which the past century, or half century, has seen, have come vastly increased opportunities to women for leisure, for release from domestic duties, and for the prolongation of school life. The statistics of high schools and colleges sufficiently show the use which they are making of this leisure. Other facts are equally obvious and significant as showing the transfer of the basis of woman's life from domestic experience to books. The woman's club, I suppose, may be said fairly to take the place of the sewing circle of our mothers and grandmothers. The contrast even in the name is significant, as marking the transfer of interest from the circle of domestic experience to the wider domain of the recorded life of the world, to the realm of books.

Thus at whatever point we examine the life of the present, we find it basing itself on books, both for action and enjoyment, and that in an ever-increasing degree. This truth is peculiarly evident to you as librarians, since the facts of your own profession and the rapid growth of libraries and library work afford one of the latest phases of this general movement.

From 1875 to 1896 the number of libraries in the United States just about doubled, increasing steadily, and adding, during this period, about 2,000 libraries, or a little less than 100 per year. From 1896 to 1900, 1,350 libraries were added, or about 450 per year. From 1900 to 1903, 1,500 libraries were founded, or 500 per year. In the past ten years the number of libraries must have doubled; a ratio growth at least four times that of the population....

It is plain that the adjustment of the library to this movement of men's minds towards books is the most important practical question for all of us. Questions of management, of administration, of methods are all of secondary importance beside this one--if, indeed they may be called even secondary. For this change of base is a revolutionary affair, not a mere matter of readjustment of detail, and it is no easy task for the library to find itself in such a movement. Libraries are so small a part of the national intellectual life, so small, in the mass, for example, in comparison to the great universities, that their proper influence and work are easily overlooked. There is sometimes danger that they may be swept into currents guided by other forces rather than find opportunity freely to contribute their own share to the movement.

Let us turn then to the more practical side of the question, and ask how the library is adjusting itself, in this changed relation of men, where it has best succeeded, and where it still has most to do. Let us ask where experience seems to promise successful solution of problems, and where the problems are in that stage in which only doubtful success can be expected from experiments, and final solution still lies far before us.

The library began as a place to keep books, permitting their use by the public, but often under such restrictions as seem to indicate that this service was granted "grudgingly and of necessity." Books and the high life were in some obscure way correlated in the mind of the librarian, and he too often seemed to feel that these were treasures not to be shared by the many. The first change which came, therefore, as the library was swept into the general intellectual current of time, was the removal of restrictions on the use of books and their replacement by devices intended to encourage and extend that use. A second step, and a much more revolutionary one, has been to teach the community directly the uses of books, and thus not merely to afford easy conditions for the use of books on the part of those who want them, but to add a positive force which will compel the books to go out in the community, there to perform their present service and to create a demand for an increased service in the future.

This change marks a fundamental departure of the library from its old basis, and one which will affect it greatly, for good and perhaps for ill. The movement toward freedom of administration was really concerned with small matters, and left unaltered the central plan and purpose of the library. But with the assumption of direct educational work for children, for women, for men, the library has entered upon a new epoch in its evolution. It has taken up duties whose performance will demand greatly enlarged resources--of space and of money, of books and of working staff. And what is of even greater importance, the purpose, the point of view, of those who control the library, and the temper of the administration, will change, and ought to change, under the pressure of these new duties.

This positive and educational library work falls into two main types--that for children, and that for adults--both men and women. It is still in a tentative condition, in a formative and experimental period. The results are still so few and recent that they do not admit any exact formulation. They permit only general and suggestive statement.

Work for children is, in some ways, the easiest educational attempt of the library, since it runs parallel to the work of the schools, and those for whom the work is done are easily reached and easily guided. Its function is, of course, in part to supplement the school. It would be, however, a great misfortune if it were looked upon merely as a supplement to the school, as a means of providing reading which the school ought to buy, but cannot afford. Its purpose is rather to begin in childhood, both for pleasure and for profit, a voluntary association with books which lie wholly outside of the school program. It aims to begin the early formation of the habit of reading as distinguished from study--a habit which will be permanent, instead of ending with the period of formal instruction. It recognizes the fact that school life must soon end, and that when the end comes, the important feature of the child's intellectual condition is not so much the amount he has learned as the temper and habit of his mind toward books. Has he merely learned certain truths from books or are books open to him? It is of fundamental importance to the community that the second alternative be secured. The school libraries and children's librarians are, therefore, not to feel that their duty is to supplement the school. That duty lies on a different, and, in a way, a higher plane, in a more spiritual region. It is their part to make the child a citizen of the world of books, and to naturalize him so thoroughly that he will always remain a citizen. Thus only can he share fully, not only in the high and permanent pleasures that books afford, but also in that great movement of life toward books which marks our time.

From remarks which I have heard on various occasions, I believe this extension of library service and library duties to youth has often been misunderstood. Work with school children, whether done by the library force as part of their duties, or by assistants especially engaged, has seemed to many to be a somewhat unnecessary extension of the library--something of a luxury. These added duties have often been assumed by the libraries under special pleas, and for reasons temporary in character. But in that wider view which I am trying to present, the truth is recognized that the library is a permanent storehouse of books for the community, to which the citizen of every class and age must repair for knowledge not only interesting and useful but necessary to the conduct of life. We recognize also that while the training of the schools soon ceases for every individual, the service of the library extends throughout life. We assert also that the possibilities of this service must be taught to the members of the community from childhood, and that the efficiency of the books will largely depend on the efficiency with which this teaching is done.

Especial care must be taken with children and youth toward the end of the ordinary school periods--in the upper grades and in the high school. Here it is that the transition to independent reading must come. The children's room must not be merely an appendage to the kindergarten and primary school, but the library must supply to youth of all ages not only books, but inspiration in reading. The questions which arise in work for children are many and often perplexing, but if these general principles are accepted, they are, after all, questions of detail rather than of principle.

The library's influence over women has been the greatest in extent and productive of the largest results; so much so that, in the opinion of many critics of the public library, that institution is in danger of becoming "feminized." I shall not attempt to discuss so large a subject as that indicated by this fearful word, but it may not be unprofitable to touch upon the causes which have given the work of the library for women at once so great an extension and so great a success, as well as some obvious limitations. I should place first among the causes, both for the success and the limitation of this influence, the recent acquisition by women of large opportunities for the intellectual life, their natural conservatism, and their greatly increased leisure as compared with men. That women read books, and read them in enormous numbers, is granted, indeed asserted. That they read seriously I have heard questioned and have always wondered at the doubt. It seems to me rather that they never read in any way except seriously. How many women--reading women, I mean--can put away an unfinished book without a sense of guilt? How many can "browse about" in a library and enjoy doing so? How many really like to read a dictionary or encyclopaedia without ulterior designs upon an article for the women's club, or, at least, without wanting to know something? These are all tests--unconscious, but none the less excellent--of the real readers, of those to whom books are alive and intimate friends. While I have no statistics at hand, I fear that many women most devoted to libraries would fail to reach this standard. The field of the intellectual life has been widely opened to women so recently that they still feel a certain sense of duty along with the privilege which is granted them in entering it, rather than a complete sense of being at home there. The conservatism of women helps this tendency to read seriously and for general purposes. The traditional use of books as a means of culture appeals to their more conservative mind as it does not to men. They are more easily induced to read for reading's sake--they are willing to read the books one ought to read. They are moved by considerations of mental improvement independent of any result beyond the improvement itself. The library as a library attracts them. Then, too, the amount of their reading and its character is modified by the fact that women are so much more limited than men in means to pass their leisure. Jerome K. Jerome (if correctly reported by newspapers) recently pointed out that much so-called reading is no more an intellectual process than is smoking a cigar, and that often we go to books just as to the cigar, to pass the time and to prevent the intrusion of disagreeable thoughts. Of course this is, and ought to be, wholly true, and since with us the cigar is a masculine privilege, the woman must take to books as the man takes to smoking, and even to drinking. Speaking seriously, the library is to many women a relief from care--the only distraction from the monotony of routine. It is a cheap and easy thing to sneer at this use of books, but we who believe in the friendship of books know that here lies one of the greatest blessings they can give, as it is one of the greatest blessings of true friendship. Nor do we wonder that the uncultivated, or the half-cultivated, often choose their book friends from a class not greatly above their own.

On the other hand, women have hardly begun to use books on lines along which we are seeking to get men to read--in directions connected with their trade or profession. Domestic industries, so far as they are in the hands of women, are still most wholly dependent upon tradition. They are not exposed to competition. Failure or inefficiency does not put the proprietor out of business. Their results are not measured in dollars and cents. In a word, the whole line of motives which is forcing masculine industries over to the basis of books is lacking in the chief feminine occupations. We are now seeing only the feeble beginnings of the attempt thus to transfer them from tradition to science. A long time must pass, and social conditions greatly change, before the transfer is made. Thus women are not forced from general to special lines of reading, while they have greater motive for general reading than have men.

As a result, women are becoming, to a degree without example in the past, the possessors and transmitters of the life of culture. I do not believe that fewer men read good literature than formerly, but the increase in masculine readers of this type has been so much less than the increase in women readers that in comparison the number of men seems to have shrunken greatly. Of course much of this reading by women for culture is desultory and aimless, much is misdirected. But after all deductions are made, it remains true that the knowledge of books seems to be tending to become the possession of women rather than of men. It has always belonged to a certain class of men--not a very large part of the community--and it is still theirs; but its extension to other classes has been along female lines rather than male, and its transmission to the next generation seems only too likely to depend in a large measure upon the female line. College statistics at present show the same facts. Language, literature, and art are the chosen studies of women. Men turn rather to science, economics, or politics--subjects which, they suppose, bear directly on future plans for life. These great subjects whose main purpose in education is the uplifting of the mind, the widening of the mental horizon without direct reference to any specific line of life--these appeal far more strongly to women than to men, and their influence, in a rapidly increasing degree, will reach the next generation through the mother rather than through the father. It would be a pessimistic view which would say that modern society is coming to depend on the mothers for the accumulation and transmission of culture, while retaining in the male line the function of accumulating and transmitting wealth, though much could be said for the thesis and a very plausible argument could be constructed for it.