The qualities which enabled him to accomplish all this included not merely certain native abilities—among them, penetration, concentration, vigor, tenacity of purpose and directness of method, but others developed by self-denial, self-discipline, and a complete dedication to the work in hand. It was through these that he earned his education and his scientific training; and they hardened into habits which attended him to the end of his days, when he concluded in toil that shirked no detail a life begun in toil and devoted to detail.
Such habits, a keen faculty of analysis, and a scientific training kept him aloof alike from hasty generalizations and from the impulses of mere emotion; while his military training induced in him three characteristics which marked alike his treatment of measures and his dealings with men; incisiveness, a distaste for the superfluous and the redundant, and an insistence upon the suitable subordination of the part to the whole. In this combination, and in the knowledge of, and power over, men which accompanied it, he was unique among librarians; in his complete lack of ostentation he was unusual among men. His mind was ever on the substance, indifferent to the form. A power in two professions, to have termed him the "ornament" of either would have affronted him; for he was consistently impatient of the merely ornamental. Any personal ostentation was actually repugnant to him; and he avoided it as completely in what he suffered as in what he achieved; bearing, with a reticence that asked no allowances, physical anguish in which most men would have found ample excuse from every care.
If such a combination of traits assured his remarkable efficiency, it might not have seemed calculated to promote warm personal or social attachments. Yet there was in him also a singular capacity for friendship; not indeed for impulsive and indiscriminate intimacies, but for those selective, deep, steady and lasting friendships which are proof of the fundamental natures of men. And however terse, austere, and even abrupt, his manner in casual relations, where a really human interest was at stake he might be relied upon for sympathies both warm and considerate, and the more effective because consistently just and inevitably sincere.
The testimonies to these qualities in his character, to these powers, and to his varied achievements, have already been many and impressive. The American Library Association wishes to add its own, with a special recognition not merely of the value to the community of the things which he accomplished, but of the value to individuals in the example of a character and abilities so resolutely developed and so resolutely applied to the service of science and the service of men.
The PRESIDENT: To offer a telegram as a substitute for a long and pleasurably anticipated paper is cause for regret, but such must be the case this morning as Miss Arnold finds it impossible to be with us. The telegram reads as follows:
"Emergency meeting of Simmons College Corporation has been appointed for Wednesday and prevents me from attending library meeting. Extreme regrets.
SARAH LOUISE ARNOLD."
The general theme of this morning's session is "Library influence in the home, in the shop, on the farm, and among defectives and dependents." We shall begin the morning's program with a paper on "The working library for the artisan and the craftsman," by EDWARD F. STEVENS, librarian Pratt Institute free library, and director of the school of library science, Brooklyn.