Part 40

The nation which lives by the newspaper will lose touch with the past. The nation which lives in the library will want knowledge of the present. We know all too much as Americans of the peril of thinking by the newspapers. German thought has run in the seclusive channel of the academic library to the lack and loss of civic consciousness. Germany was the last of modern states to act as a people. We were the first, the balance and connection between the newspaper and the library, news and liberal letters, the reporter and the professor, cuts up by the roots the frequent conception of the library as a place occult, withheld, untrod; shut apart from practical ends, the grant of society to the scholar--useful to letters, useless to life. This "idol of the market-place" falls to pieces confronted by the facts of social structure. As well might the brain be held silent, the voice of memory dumb, the light of consciousness in darkness by the side of the brute mechanical forces of the body; silence, seclusion, separation from the active life of society, these may be for the exchange and the market-place, the railroad and the factory, vast, dumb mechanic processes which perish in producing, but not for the library--not here, not here. These walls ring with war. They sound with the conflicts of the race. Here, rather than in any arsenal is heard

--"the infinite fierce chorus, The cries of agony, the endless groan, Which, through the ages that have gone before us, In long reverberations reach our own."

Thus much for the library in organized society. Long since have we known of books as the counsellors and comforters of men. To us all they have been teachers, to each of us companions. That great majority, greater in wisdom no less than in number, in which by the iron decrees of fate so many are called and so few are chosen to lasting immortality, holds all of whom living the world was not worthy, but of whom dead it slowly seeks to be. Here and here alone in all shapes and forms, we build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers crucified and here doubtless our children will build the sepulchres of those who in our day are despised and afflicted of men for the truth's sake. In joy and in grief, in life and in death some book supports, sustains, and soothes each of us, and in this library the very light has been trained to teach us at every window and door that we might enter it to pass within the presence of the mighty dead, to enjoy the companionship of that great company no man can number of wise men made perfect by time.

But to the seeing eye and the hearing ear, awake and attentive to all that a library is, not for men but for man, not for individuals but for the race, a greater than Solomon is here, and a mightier shape fills these halls and looks down from these shelves than all the trooped and illustrious dead. These books, shelf on shelf, these volumes, which fit subject by subject into the storied arch of human knowledge, resting one side on metaphysics and the other on history, the science of mind and the science of man, seem existent human memory. The complete library would round and fill the record of the race. At best, we have but a beggarly fragment. If a single copy of each of the 13,000,000 volumes which dropped from the press in 450 years were by some glad miracle multiplying knowledge gathered in one place, human memory would be unbroken for this short span of its long stay on the globe. Of 13,000,000 but 1,000,000 rest in the largest library on earth in Bloomsbury Square, and not a half are gathered in all known libraries. But such as it is, large or small complete or incomplete, a great library to its capacity gives, as this has begun to do, the only measure we have of the recollection of the race. Here we stand face to face not with men or nations, race or people, but with man. Blindly our humanity still struggles to shape its thought, dumb, inarticulate, unconscious, travelling in darkness and laboring in pain, century by century, and generation by generation, in the slow pilgrimage toward the conscious and consecration before it. The thunder of its power who shall know? Who shall sound its depths or scale its heights? Who shall know it in all its compass and sound, measure the confines thereof or prophesy its far final coming? These are all hid in the inscrutable decrees of God from the sight of men, but here, here and in places like this there rises before us like an exhalation of the past in these volumes, in this library, the majestic and visible memory of man.

Rightly here, as in that larger treasure house in London, have we gathered museum and library under the same roof. These shapeless fragments worked by the early cunning of savage man, these inscribed marbles and sculptured slabs, these tablets and relics of another and a distant life, these all, each in its place, play their part in the recorded memory of the race. Out of every fragment from every book shines this Ancient of Days, who before Abraham was and after us shall be. Who and what are we, creatures of a day, toilers of an hour, to be measuring by our experience the metes and bounds in the manifestations of his mighty memory. Rather let our labor be given to render complete and to transmit unbroken our share in this great heritage by preserving the universal printed record of the life about us. The librarian falling far short of the honor and amplitude of his office, standing between the living past and the slowly dying life of the present, now and then apologizes for saving every empty volume, because none but prescient omniscience can tell which of 10,000 titles will be demanded by some solitary reader a century hence. How petty the plea, how narrow the argument, how infinitesimal the claims of this distant reader who after all may never appear! But how simple, how sufficient, how adequate becomes the reason for the preservation of every volume when we remember that it, too, is a part of this vast image of human memory seated by the slow river of time, more vocal than that of Memnon, older and younger, and with every fresh sunburst of genius breaking into fresh song!

In high reason has our own Historical Society gathered every volume which fell in this State and city from the press of the last century. Only thus can the span of human memory be set forth without a single forgetful flaw. If the like effort is made here to fill a like responsibility for the passing moment to the future, it is possible that the Historical Society of another century will not find it necessary to pay $700 for an almanac which might once have been had for a penny, and yet how grievous the gap in the continuous and social memory of this our city if the solitary copy left of Bradford's Almanac, the first product of our press, had not found a secure resting-place.

A great library, therefore, does not merely transmit the memory of the past; it is daily providing memory for the future, safe preserved "against the wreckful siege of battering days." For the individual no worse hap can fall than loss of memory. All other powers may remain. This lost, all are worthless. Stripped of memory, the soul has no future and no past, naught save an infructuose now. Nor less, the race. The destruction of the Alexandrian Library, whether with Abulfaraj we attribute it to the intelligent Moslem, or with Gibbon to the ignorant monk, was not the loss of so many books and parchments. It was the paralysis of a great lobe of human memory, fatal lesion had fallen on the localized organ of recollection in the brain of humanity. If we had the 200 plays of Aeschylus, the 160 of Sophocles, the last books of Livy, the missing annals of Tacitus, which this library held, the stature of these writers would not be increased. Like the greater peaks of every chain they already rise as they recede. It is only the foot-hill that needs bulk. These, and lost books like them, would fill for us the full measures of classic memory. As library after library perished and book after book shared the fate of those fathered by Ptolemy, the wreck and loss of human memory went on. The ages that we call dark lacked not in men of action. Those ages of faith had their men of thought matching any before or after. They laid for us the foundations of a civil liberty more indestructible than that of Rome. The piers of that great arch of law along which our rights daily travel in safety were built by them. Their architecture and their sculpture equals any. Their knowledge of the earth, as a whole, was immeasureably in advance of classic conception. They furnished in Dante one of the two or three poets for all time, and in the Roman Church they gave the race a creation and conception of whose future it would be a rash man who ventured to say that it was destined to be less than its past, imperial as its history has been. These ages were dark, not from lack of light and of leading, but from lack of memory. The ages had lost touch of the elbow in their march through the dark defile of time. The Renaissance was less the revival of human knowledge than the recovery of human memory. Age was joined again to age in the unbroken sequence of continuous recollection, and Greece laid her hands to transmit an Apostolic succession of memory on the bowed and studious head of the modern world.

To play its part in transmitting and preserving human memory this library is tonight opened and dedicated. Our Library Committee, and you, sir, its head, who have shown us that whole libraries of comment may be condensed into a volume by your magic alembic, providing for criticism a new instrument of precision akin to the measurements and the analysis of the exact science--you, sir, in the loving care you have given this building, have not been providing a retreat for scholars; you have built and fashioned here another refuge and stronghold, fortified

"Against confounding Age's cruel knife That he shall never cut from memory."

The architect of this building has not wrought in mere brick and stone; he has added to those shrines and centres of human memory to which its treasures gravitate for their security and convenience. This university, in receiving this building from its Finance Committee, which has raised its cost, and whose head first suggested its erection, is placed in a position where it can discharge not only the first duty of a university, to which it has always been true, of thinking for the community, but the second, which is like unto it, of remembering for society.

COLLECTION OF INFORMATION

One of the functions of the modern library is that of a huge cyclopedia, kept continually up to date by the acquisition of new material--books, periodicals, prints, pamphlets, clippings, publicity matter and manuscripts. It is the cyclopedia on cards long advocated by Dr. Dewey, except that the cards are in its catalogue and do not contain the information directly but serve only as keys to it. In this kind of service the library is for the moment getting away from books and nearer to the worker, whether at home, in school or laboratory, or in commerce and industry.

LIBRARIES AS BUREAUS OF INFORMATION

Early material on this ancient function of libraries, so widely extended and developed of late, is hard to find. Only two papers are given here. The first, by Samuel S. Green, is part of an address delivered at the dedication of the Haston Free Public Library Building in North Brookfield, Mass., printed in The Library Journal for July, 1896. A sketch of Mr. Green appears in Vol. I. of this series.

The ideal library is one which invites everybody who has a question to ask, which books contain answers to, to come to the library and put his question, with the assurance that he will be kindly received, his question sympathetically considered, and every effort made to find the answer desired.

I cannot better illustrate what I mean by saying that libraries should be bureaus of information than by giving instances of inquiries recently made in the library under my charge and explaining how those inquiries were met. I will select questions which were answered by sending out of town for books, and thus illustrate in addition the fact that libraries administered on advanced principles help one another.

A man came to me not long since and asked by what means he could dissolve a certain gum which he mentioned. I had the United States Dispensatory brought. The man did not find the answer wished for in that work, but did find a reference to a volume of the Pharmaceutical Journal. We did not have a set of that periodical; so I said that I would send away to borrow the desired volume. I sent to the librarian of the medical library in Boylston place, Boston, for it. He sent it to me immediately by express. That volume contained some of the information desired by the inquirer, but not all that he wanted. There was another volume of the same periodical which he thought would contain the facts which he was in search of. I sent for that, promising to return both volumes at once. The second volume was immediately received. That contained just what was wanted.

By doing work like this a librarian may do much to add to the prosperity of the industries of a town.

Another man came to me to inquire whether we had a catalog of a certain southern society which purported to do hospital work.

I found that we had no catalog of the society named. It appeared that the applicant for information had been asked to contract to do $4000 worth of work for a society of the name mentioned and wished to learn something about its standing. I told him that if I were in his place I should write to a gentleman in Washington, whose name I gave him, who knows all about medical institutions and hospitals throughout the country, to ask him about the society; I offered to write, myself, as the applicant felt timid about writing.

I did write and soon had the answer that the correspondent would advise the Worcester man to be very cautious about entering into a contract, for he knew nothing about the existence of such a society. I hope that I helped to save a Worcester business man from loss on this occasion.

Again, a boy who came into Worcester to school called at the library to ask me what I could tell his brother about a school for instruction in tanning leather in Freiberg, Saxony. Did it receive Americans? what was the cost of attending its sessions? what was its curriculum? etc., were questions asked.

I had no pamphlet to give the required information, but suggested that the Commissioner of Education at Washington be written to, to find out what information could be found in the library of his office. I found that it would be necessary for me to write the letter; so I wrote it. Soon the answer came giving the information desired and stating the address of the school. The answer was passed over to the applicant, with the suggestion that if further information were desired he should write to the officers of the school.

I remember doing much to start in her studies a resident of Worcester who has since become a distinguished Russian scholar, by helping her to get a Russian-German dictionary from abroad and by borrowing Russian books for her to read from Harvard College Library.

Three students of the Chinese language have received assistance at my library, one a missionary at home on leave, the other two students under the late Chinese professor of Harvard University, from dictionaries and other books borrowed for their use.

I have had occasion to hunt up books in the language of the Exquimaux for the use of an investigator in Worcester. I could not find the books in the libraries of Harvard University or Columbia College, and tried the libraries of other centres of learning without success, when I remembered that Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the well-known Indian scholar and historical student, had brought together a fine collection of philological works in the Watkinson Library at Hartford, Connecticut. The librarian of that library wrote me after a few days, saying that he had the books and would send them at once. He apologized for not despatching them before, saying that the library did not allow books to be taken out. He had waited to consult the president. The president had said that they must set aside the rule if Mr. Green and the library in Worcester wanted the books, for it was evident that they were needed for some important purpose. We got the books and they were used in the preparation of a learned paper.

Now, for closing illustrations, let me show you how libraries at great distances help one another. I will choose the relations of the library in Worcester to the Public Library of Denver, Colorado. Mr. Dana, the librarian of that library, sent to me to borrow one of the publications of the Browning Society of London. It was sent to him by registered mail and returned, safely, in the same way.

Next he wanted, for some student of mining, an extract from one of the volumes of the Comptes Rendus of the French Academy. The extract was copied from the volume and sent to him. There has since occurred the following transaction. A gentleman in Chicago had written to Mr. Dana, in Denver, to ask him whether he knew of a translation of the report of a government railroad commission in Holland which had recently been engaged in considering what kinds of paint are best to use in preserving iron, and whether he could tell him where to find the results of certain experiments which had been made in one of the bureaus of the U.S. Navy Department. Mr. Dana passed along the question to me, knowing that I had often to answer questions of that kind. In order to find an answer to the first question, I at once set a young man at work looking at the indexes of the late volumes of the Railroad and Engineering Journal, and soon an important article was unearthed giving the results of the investigations of the Dutch commission. This piece of information was sent to Denver. I then wrote to Mr. Henry C. Baird, the Philadelphia publisher, to see if he knew of the publication of a translation of the report. He wrote back that he did not know of the publication of such a translation, but that there was a long article on paints useful in the preservation of iron in one of the most recently issued volumes of Spons's "Receipts." He promised, however, to make further inquiries. So he went to the rooms of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and inquired there what gentleman in the city was most likely to have the information sought for. He was referred to some one connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad Co., who told him that he was not aware that the report had been translated, but referred the inquirer to an elaborate article extending through several numbers of the well-known periodical, Iron. Mr. Baird transmitted the information he had got to me and I sent it and other pieces of information gained since my last letter to the library of Denver. The information sent to Denver was sent to Chicago. So by the aid of two far separated librarians a person in Chicago, an intermediate city, distant from the homes of both, received information which he desired through Denver, Worcester, and Philadelphia. For an answer to his second question, this inquirer from Chicago was referred to the Navy Department at Washington.