It is not my privilege to speak to you at this time of the professional, technical, or practical aspects of that recent phase of library work wherein is attempted the reconciliation of shopmen with bookmen. In the very few moments placed at my disposal I may mention only that human relationship which enters so largely into a librarian's dealings with men who are concerned with and about their work.
The straightforward, sympathetic intercourse of man with man may adorn to the point of making almost beautiful a department of librarianship which is extremely matter-of-fact in its essential character and might easily become commonplace in its practicality. The business of a technology department in a public library may best be expressed in terms of the statement of the policy of the Franklin Union established in recent years in Philadelphia—"the further education of men already employed." Such a working library is strictly a library of work. It is almost oppressively utilitarian. Yet to a librarian who has had the privilege of making books known to artisans and craftsmen, and who is now denied that privilege, the sense of the loss of the fellowships, not to say friendships, that formerly were a part of his daily occupation proves that the sympathetic was after all the potential element in his experience.
I may say with Lowell, "I like folks who like an honest piece of steel.... There is always more than the average human nature in a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron."
Theodore Roosevelt has given us a maxim that deserves to be written as a rule of life—"That which one does which all can do but won't do is the greatest of greatness."
Therein is the greatness of work with practical men—the discernment of the simplest facts of life, the performance of the simplest acts of life in working out the complex things of life, recognizing, to begin with, that a man's difficulty is at once less a difficulty when it becomes the friendly concern of a fellow-man. My own first experience as a seeker after help in a public library in matters technical that were then of great importance to me, met the rebuff and disappointment that have given me a point of view which amounts to a conviction.
In the present day, the library assumes considerable confidence in inviting the workingman into its constituency, and the workingman must come to it with no less confidence if the library expects its justification. The mechanic, as formerly the scholar, must approach the library with a calculated expectation. The librarian must understand him, believe in him, and in turn make himself understood by him.
In a recent issue of the American Machinist, a writer deplores the general lack of sympathy and interest in the affairs of the "unheralded mechanic." That the life he lives has no place in men's thoughts nor in literature. This is the closing statement: "As it is, if left to themselves, mechanics will by their silence continue to let those outside the shop think of them as nothing but men tied to a whistle."
Leigh Hunt (himself very much an outsider) in a familiar essay makes this friendly observation: "A business of screws and iron wheels is, or appears to be, a very commonplace matter; but not so the will of the hand that sets them in motion; not so the operations of the mind that directs them what to utter."
But this mechanic that now nears the public library is coming neither as a pathetic figure in distress, nor as a mysterious or heroic figure beyond our comprehension. He comes as an unpretending man dignified by earnestness of purpose not to discredit an honorable vocation.
The best of mutual understanding and feeling, however, will not secure the chief ends of librarianship except so far as they splendidly prepare the way. The recognition of books as tools comes only as the books stand the same practical test that the workman applies to his instruments.