This is the way in which much of our knowledge is collected. Edison found the right substance for his first carbon filament by sending for all sorts of materials from all over the world, carbonizing them, and trying them out. The right one proved to be a kind of bamboo. If Edison had hit on this at the first trial it would have been so “lucky” a chance as almost to be counted a miracle; as it was, he eliminated chance by multiplication. Nothing annoys an executive so much as to be told that the adoption of this or that course will result in a specified way, when no one has ever tried it. This was a common attitude in the time of Galileo, when the idea that anything could be found out by observation or experiment was regarded as a public scandal. That was the time when a man refused to look through the newly-invented telescope for fear that he might see something contrary to the teachings of Aristotle. These people are not all dead by any means. I have heard them assert that a proposed change would ruin the library and then object to trying it because they were afraid the result would be contrary to their own predictions. The medieval philosophers at least had Aristotle to fall back on; their modern successors would appear to be posing as Aristotles themselves.
A housemaid recently said to her mistress “I’ve told everybody to-day ye weren’t at home; now don’t sit in the window and make me a liar.” No discovery; no falsehood, you see. So if we librarians can be prevented from trying experiments, the false predictions of some of our advisers will not be false in their own eyes, simply because they will not be exposed.
My advice to librarians, and to everyone else is to keep on trying experiments. If you get a satisfactory result the first time, you may stop, and ascribe it, if you please, to your good luck. If the result is unsatisfactory, however, you need not stand pat on your ill luck.
“If at first you don’t succeed
Try, try again”.
There is more philosophy in that than in all Aristotle. It is also a practical exposition of the doctrine of chances. Somewhere is the combination that you want. You will find it, if you only keep on long enough.
Libraries that are afraid of being victimized by chance, or, as we may put it, becoming martyrs to bad luck, should ponder somewhat more closely the possibilities of relief from insurance. Of course here I am using the word “luck” in its simpler meaning of unforeseen occurrence. Take the case of the library that suffers from the fact that an influential member of the committee that fixes the amount of its annual appropriation has eaten something indigestible for breakfast. Such an unforeseeable occurrence, such a “piece of bad luck”, might cost a library anywhere from two to twenty thousand dollars, according to the usual size of its appropriation.
Equally injurious might be the illness of the president of the Board, throwing upon an incompetent member the duty of presenting the library’s claims and needs. It is surely unjust that a public-service institution should be at the mercy of such trivial chances. In some states, including my own, the library is removed from such ill-luck as this by a statutory provision fixing its public income, subject to proper checks and taking away the ability of an individual’s illness or indisposition to lower it. But where this ill-chance is still in its baleful working order, why should not the library be protected against it by insurance? Such protection would be analogous to the corporation insurance taken out by large industrial companies to offset the loss likely to result from the death of an officer on whose administrative ability much of the company’s earning power depends, or to the payment of death duties by insurance, now being advocated by many companies, and adopted on a huge scale by Mr. J.P. Morgan. Insurance is the great equalizer; it multiplies instances, enlarges the field of possibilities and abolishes ill-luck. We are availing ourselves of it in case of possible damage by fire or storm, or of loss through our liability as employers. We may in future use it to cut out chance and luck in other fields also and to make our resources so dependable that we may devote to the extension and betterment of service the ingenuity now often spent solely in devising means “to get along”.
I am afraid that you will compare this address very unfavorably with the celebrated chapter on snakes in Iceland, because whereas the author of that was able to announce the non-existence of his subject in six words, it has taken me a good many thousand. You will do me an injustice, however, if you think that I have simply been demonstrating the non-existence of luck. I believe that when we say a man is lucky, we mean something definite, and that thing surely has an existence. It may not be the Goddess Fortuna, or her modern successor, but it is very real and it is worth investigating and taking into account. If you are told that one of your assistants is “lucky”, do not laugh it away. Find out the facts, and if they indicate that she is unusually successful in what she undertakes, be thankful that you have a lucky person on your staff. Cherish her and promote her. And if you can find such a person outside of your library, with the other necessary qualifications, prefer him, or her, in making an appointment, to one of the “unlucky” variety. It is of the lucky kind that the world’s geniuses are made—inventors like Bell, Edison and Marconi, captains of industry like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Henry Ford, soldiers like Napoleon, Grant, and Moltke, statesmen like Lincoln, Gladstone and Bismarck, poets like Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe. We have had too few of these in the library profession. They were all lucky and what we need, especially in the present emergency, is plenty of “Luck in the Library”.
THE LIBRARY AS A MUSEUM
Boundary regions are always interesting. Close to the line separating two regions of fact or of thought cluster the examples that fascinate us. Kipling’s stories of India are so interesting because they tell of the meeting points of two civilizations—the boundary along which they come into contact, interact and fuse. The same is true of all tales of the white man and the red Indian, of the stories of early explorers, of the narratives of Spanish conquistadores in the south and French Jesuits in the north. The student of mathematical physics will tell you that it is not in homogeneous regions, but along boundary lines that the application of his equations becomes difficult, and at the same time interesting. Our whole human life is conditioned by boundaries. It is possible only on a surface separating the earth’s mass from its atmosphere. It is limited by narrow conditions of temperature, nourishment, light, and so on. So we need not be astonished when we find that two related subjects of any kind acquire new vitality and new interest when we study the region along the line where they touch. This is especially true of the library and the museum.