We have gone far enough, perhaps, to realize that our two sins are indeed cardinal and fundamental. The authors of the Prayer Book were right. We have done those things that we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things that we ought to have done; and we are all miserable sinners.
If I had nerve enough to add a new society to the thousand and one that carry on their multifarious activities about us, I should found a League to Suppress Duplications and Supply Omissions.
A MESSAGE TO BEGINNERS
History may be described as an account of the conflict between the tendency of things to move and efforts to fasten them down so that they will keep still. Where they have been moving in the wrong direction these efforts have been praiseworthy; but in too many instances motion has been resisted simply because it is motion, quiescence being looked upon as the supreme good. In his interesting “History of Fiji”, Dr. Alfred Goldsborough Mayer notes that the difference between the savage and the civilized man is not one of content of knowledge, for the savage often knows far more than we do, but is due to the fact that the savage is bound hand and foot by tradition—he is a slave to his imagination, and to that of his forefathers. The conflict in his case has ended definitely with the triumph of the fastening down process. There is no more motion. He can not fall back, but neither can he move forward. He is locked in one position—that of the particular generation, five, fifty or five hundred years ago, when his fight for progress was lost.
With the civilized man the fight still goes on. It is not yet won nor lost and the story of it, as I have said, is history. Read it in this light and it will assume for you new significance. Wars, revolutions, changes of dynasty, racial migrations, linguistic changes, the achievements of art, the triumphs of science, the evolution of social systems, the development of justice, the rise of literature and the drama—everything that marks the story of what has been going on in the world—is but a phase of this age-long struggle between forces and obstacles of whose origins, at bottom, we know little. So far as the obstacles have won, there are still savage elements lurking in us; so far as we have thrust them aside, we are advancing further toward civilization. The one title that we have to call ourselves civilized is the fact that no set of traditions or customs—no institution—has yet become crystallized into the fixity that obtains with the savage races;—not the Church, not government, not science, nor art nor literature. All these are changing, despite efforts to pin them down. Our language, our social customs are altering; our fashions of dress change from year to year. Our old people, for a man often reverts to savagery in his old age, pass away with words of regret on their lips for the good old days of their youth, when things were different. A savage has never to do this, for the days of his youth and his age are precisely the same—custom, speech, habit, observance, tradition, all are locked up into fixity.
The education of the savage is directed toward perpetuating this fixity; that of the civilized man should be a force in the opposite direction. Recognizing that change is the life-blood of civilization, it should be devoted to controlling and directing that change, leading the mind of the pupil to anticipating and welcoming it and bracing that mind against all feeling of shock due to the mere starting of the machinery of progress. I say this is what education should be. I believe that it is tending in this way. But a large part of it is still savage—an effort to keep our customs, thoughts and actions to standards set up by our ancestors.
The Public Library, we are fond of saying, is an educational institution; which kind of education shall it dispense? Shall it be a motor or a brake? Shall it look back into the past or forward into the future?
To many persons, the idea of a forward-looking library seems absurd. It is essentially a repository of records, and records are of the past. You will find somewhere, unless oblivion has overtaken it, an address by your lecturer on “The Public Library as a Conservative Force”. Such it doubtless is and such it should be—but its conservatism is that of control, not of stagnation. It is the skilled driver who keeps the car in the road—not the ignoramus who stalls it in the ditch. Records are assuredly of the past; but the past and its records may be looked upon in either of two ways—as standards for all time, or as foundations on which to build for the future. The civilized man rejoices in foundations—he builds them deep and strong, and erects upon them some noble superstructure. The savage puts up his great stone circle, mighty and wonderful perhaps, but complete in itself and of no manner of use.
So I ask you, what is our collection of records to be—a stone circle or a foundation?
Now the records themselves—the books—can never determine this any more than the great monolith can determine whether it is going into a Stonehenge or into the foundation of a Parthenon. It is what we do to the books—to and with them—that matters.