Part 50

With the spread of intelligence and thought, and the consequent elevation of popular ideals, men possessed of millions will not seek to add to their large legitimate gains by legalized robbery from their fellow-citizens; and people calling themselves Christians will not rejoice in the distress and starvation of their fellow-men across the ocean. Men will still be selfish but their selfishness will at least be on a higher plane--less intense, less destructive of essential rights.

How shall we most speedily bring about this desired consummation? By what agency can we most effectively elevate our national ideals? By extending and improving our system of popular education, by reversing the usual order and beginning where school curricula now end, by placing our school-children from their earliest years in close and familiar contact with the life and thought of the race as expressed in literature, by exciting in every child admiration and emulation of the world's true heroes, by feeding the imagination and cultivating the moral faculties, by putting every child into the way of acquiring a social and a historic perspective.

I suppose I am one of those simple-minded visionary optimists of whom Prof. Royce speaks. But I do not "dislike" economic facts in the sense of ignoring them, and I am not blind to the persistence of the elemental forces of human nature. But as the abolition of slavery changed men's mental attitude towards this social crime, without at all changing human nature, just so I believe that the adoption of other social reforms would in a generation cause all men to look with horror and wonder upon social injustice that nearly every one now ignores or regards as irremediable and inevitable. I share Ruskin's scorn of the word "Utopian." "A thing is either possible or impossible." As Carlyle says, "The actual final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the ideal. Every noble work is at first impossible." In the A.L.A. we have heard the word "Utopian," or its equivalent, on more than one occasion met by the motto, "Hitch your wagon to a star"; and we have seen the impracticable an accomplished fact.

If time permitted I might risk ridicule by presenting some features of the vision that I see with the eye of faith in an all-wise and all-powerful Creater and belief in human perfectibility as an infinite progress.

"Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Gluecke Schrittweis' dem Blicke; Doch ungeschrecket, Dringen wir vorwaerts."

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth! They must upward still and onward Who would keep abreast with truth."

INDEX

Abbott, Abiel, library pioneer, 172.

Adams, Brooks, quoted, 81.

Adams, Charles Francis, trustee of Crane Library, Quincy, 308.

Adams, John Quincy, quoted, 294.

Adams, Matthew, lends books to Franklin, 133.

Adams library, Quincy, Mass., 310.

Adaptation of Libraries to Constituencies, paper, by S.S. Green; in full, 307.

Addingham, Eng., home of Robert Collyer, 105.

Addison, Joseph, quoted, 389.

Address at the dedication of the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, by Talcott Williams; in full, 365.

Alexander the Great, quoted, 161.

Alexandrian Library, destruction of, 377.

Allegheny, Pa., gift of conservatories, 42.

Alternatives to tax-support; general editorial introduction, 251.

American Antiquarian Soc'y, 313.

American Library Ass'n, work of, 70; catalogue praised.

American Magazine of Civics, article from, 169.

"Americans," book by Munsterberg, chapter quoted, 79.

Americans as lovers of books, 18.

Americanization, a library function, 326.

Ames, Ohio, Public Library, 26, 164.