Just one small story and then I shall have finished, for thanks must needs be brief if they come from the heart, and there is one to come after who will say to you with grace and directness and clear precision much that I might envy but never approach.
My tall brother happened by good fortune to be in London Town the night that the great city went nearly wild in her glad rejoicing at the relief of Ladysmith. It was a sight to see and join in, and he and his wife went on such progress through the streets as a cab could make for them. In his hand, at the full length of his long arm, he waved from the front of the cab a Union Jack and a Stars and Stripes to indicate his sympathy and good feeling. All went well until in one of the many enforced pauses a rough chap jumped for his hand crying, "Aw, sir! One flag'll do!"
We are very happy to be here and are just a little happier to see by these beautiful draped banners that you have not felt that One flag need to do!
The CHAIRMAN: Those of us who have gone to Washington have sometimes thought we should revise our boyhood's interpretation of the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Nothing I had ever imagined from St. John's description was quite a match for the glory and magnificence of the beautiful Library of Congress. I have found it delightful to think of a nation of great wealth providing such a fitting home for its literary treasures. Books are the friends and ministers of the mind and the soul of the people. The Washington building is the expression in materials of their aspirations for what is best and most beautiful. It is a wonderful building, leaving impressions of wonder on the casual visitor, and still more on those who linger in its chaste corridors and see something of the working of the library itself. I think of the sweet and stately beauty of the place, I think of the institution and its services, and I think also of the man who is more than a match for the magnificence of the home of those books. We will now hear from the man, Dr. HERBERT PUTNAM.
ADDRESS BY DR. PUTNAM
Our acknowledgments as visitors having now been made by the highest authority among us, it is not for the purpose of merely enlarging them that I am assigned a place upon the program. It is rather, I understand, with the view to an expression in behalf of the community of interest represented by this gathering as a whole; and some definition as to what we are, what we aim at, and wherein, if at all, we differ from our predecessors.
Our aim is in terms a simple one. It is to bring a book to a reader, to lead a reader to a book. The task may indeed vary in proportion as the book is obvious or obscure, the reader expert or a novice, so that our service may be as the shortest distance between two simple points; or as the readiest point between two distances. But its main and ultimate end is the same.
And it remains so in spite of organization grown elaborate, apparatus and mechanism grown complex. For the organization is merely to respond to a larger and more varied demand, and with a view to a more ample and diversified response.
What then is the difference between the library of today and the library of a few centuries—a single century—ago?—Is it merely in the development of this organization, the introduction of this apparatus and mechanism?—Is it to such matters that our efforts are directed?—Is it they which require incessant gatherings such as this for explanation, exploitation and discussion, and the innumerable reams of written contribution in our professional journals? They are indeed accountable for a large percentage of it: but back of them, beneath them, is a change which is fundamental, a change in attitude which is essential as no mere form or method can be. It consists in the birth and development—not indeed of a new characteristic in either book or reader, or the discovery of new potencies in the one or new sensibilities in the other—but of a new sense of responsibility on the part of the library in the utilization of the one for the benefit of the other. It is an incident of democracy.
Now, so far as democracy means the participation of the community as a whole in the conduct of its affairs the form of it has existed with us in the United States for generations; and the substance of it has existed throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. But democracy ought to mean something more: it ought to mean the participation of every individual in its opportunities. And a constitution of society which still left the resources for power and intellectual direction in the hands of the few was in effect an aristocracy, and no complete democracy. Among these resources a chief is education. And the practical monopoly of education—and of books as an element in it—meant a monopoly of influence also,—a monopoly which survived after limitations of caste were removed and the opportunities for wealth became widely diffused. Against it the free public school, the easily available college, the cheaply procurable newspaper and magazine, and the free public library fought and are fighting their fight in the interest of the prerogative of the individual, in the endeavor to equip him as an independent and co-equal unit, so that the actual constitution of society shall accord with its political form, and indeed assure the efficiency and the permanence of the form.