WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

A forecast, not of library progress alone, but of civilization itself, by one who declares himself “a simple-minded visionary optimist.” It is of the warp and woof of visions like this that the fabric of a better world is woven. Frederick Morgan Crunden, who delivered this address at the public session of the Philadelphia Conference of the American Library Association, 1897, was not, it is true, the technical founder of the St. Louis Public Library, but in his thirty-year administration of it, he originated and kept in motion the forces that have given it the position that it now holds in the community. These forces and their results were both social, and his address forms a fitting conclusion to this compilation of material on “The Library and Society.” A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in Vol. I of this series.

The present Victorian jubilee has naturally brought out a fresh group of reminiscences comparing conditions at the beginning of the reign with those now existing. The most striking contrast between the two periods lies in the advances made in the material comforts of life—improvements in lighting and heating, in locomotion and intercommunication. The progress of applied science has been so rapid that some of its most notable achievements have come within the memory of young persons still at school. Telephonic conversation between New York and St. Louis is only a thing of yesterday; aerial navigation is evidently near at hand; and already daring scientists speak hopefully of electric communication with the planets.

But it is not only in this line that the world has advanced. To note great changes in social customs, we need not go back to the last century. Sir Algernon West in a recent magazine article refers to the matter-of-course manner in which his chief was in the habit of announcing to the head clerk that he would not be at the office the following day, as he was to dine out that evening. As an indication of the social changes brought about in his lifetime, he quotes this significant sentence of Mr. Charles Villiers: “In his young days,” said Mr. Villiers, “every young man, even if he was busy, pretended to be idle; now every young man, even if he is idle, pretends to be busy.” There is great import in this. When every member of society is usefully employed, our social problems will be well on the way to solution.

To note progress in another direction we need not turn back to the acts of the 14th century, which made it a crime to give or receive more than the wretched wage fixed by law. At the beginning of the Victorian era boys and girls as young as six years worked in mines and factories longer hours than are now required of strong men; and the masses of people were compelled to pay an artificially high price for their bread, in order to increase the unearned wealth of the few.

And in our own country we need not go back to the Salem witchcraft or the persecution of the Quakers. There are still eye-witnesses to tell us that men and women in this “land of the free,” were lawfully sold like cattle or flogged to death at the will of their owners. It was a few months after Queen Victoria's accession to the throne that Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed for daring to say that human slavery was wrong—for advocating, not forcible abolition, but gradual emancipation as “the free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its propriety.” For maintaining his right to express his opinions on this or any other public question, he was driven from place to place and finally shot down in cold blood. In the city where 60 years ago he fell, a martyr to the cause of free speech, a stately monument—one of the most imposing in the country—was the other day dedicated to his memory. No American better deserves a monument. No leader in the Revolution or the Civil War was a greater hero. In my opinion, the unquestioned courage of the great Union commander is dwarfed and paled by the simple heroism of this young preacher-editor, who gave his life to a greater cause than even the preservation of the Union. Yet for some years after his death, in many cities of this country, it would have been hazardous for a man to utter his eulogy.

Here, then, is a marked advance. But we have not yet obtained entire freedom of speech on live topics. Was it not as late as last year that we hear of two librarians holding opposite political views, whose positions were rendered insecure by an unfortunate misadjustment of longitudes and political opinions? And not many miles from here a score of good, earnest men were jailed for advocating, disinterestedly, and at considerable self-sacrifice, a method of taxation that did not meet the approval of the city authorities. Still we have made great progress toward a broad tolerance. We not only permit the practice of all religious forms, but we even allow a man to deny himself the consolations of religion in any form if he chooses to do so.

In science, at least, there is absolute freedom of thought and expression. One may publish arguments to prove that the world is five thousand, or five hundred million years old, and no one will molest or denounce him; or he may announce a new theory of the universe with our moon as the stationary centre, and no state or church will anathematize him or compel him to recant. It is not till he enters the field of politics, i.e., the discussion of economic and sociological questions with a view to immediate practical results, that the advocate of new ideas reaches the danger-point. Here he finds vested interests—self-styled “vested rights,” but as often vested wrongs—on guard and alert to repel intrusion and resist inquiry. These summon to their aid the legions of unreasoning conservatism; and the innovator is made to feel the truth of the saying that there is no pain so keen as the pain of a new idea—from which, therefore, mankind has always shrunk, as a child shrinks from the surgeon's knife. We have passed the period of rack and stake; but social and business ostracism are pretty effective, while occasionally there are suggestions of tar-buckets or bullets. For the most part, however, we content ourselves with denouncing the proposer of any marked departure from existing political or sociological conditions as a “socialist,” a “communist,” and an “anarchist,” using these terms indiscriminately as abusive epithets without any definite knowledge of their meaning. From the beginning of time every social advance—and until recently every forward step in science or religion has been regarded as menacing the very foundations of society. The Reform Act of 1832, which simply took the first step towards correcting the grossest political abuses, was looked upon by the Duke of Wellington and other good men as threatening the very existence of the kingdom. The condition of affairs then existing, they considered, if not the best possible, at any rate vastly better than the political chaos that would be sure to result from change. Speaking on this blind conservative opposition to the Reform Bill, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, said:

“All the resistance to these natural changes can effect is to derange their operation, and make them act violently and mischievously instead of healthfully, or at least harmlessly. The old state of things is gone past recall, and all the efforts of all the tories cannot save it; but they may by their folly, as they did in France, get us a wild democracy or a military despotism in the room of it, instead of letting it change quietly into what it is, merely a new modification of the old state. One would think that people who talk against change were literally as well as metaphorically blind, and really did not see that everything in themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary law of its being.

“There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is, by the very law of its creation, in eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption—that our business is to preserve and not to improve.”

In his retrospect of the Victorian reign, in the June Review of Reviews, W.T. Stead says: “It is to the stoutest conservatives of our time almost inconceivable that rational beings could ever have defended the system that prevailed in Britain sixty years ago.”

I am no more assured of the rising of to-morrow's sun than I am that to the stoutest conservatives of 1950, it will appear “almost inconceivable that rational beings could ever have defended the system” that prevails in America to-day. They will, however, resist further progress as doggedly as do the conservatives of to-day, even while these see plainly how absurd was the attitude of their predecessors of sixty years ago. Your genuine conservative ever holds doggedly to things as they are. He clings tenaciously—and vainly. He belongs to a party whose defeat all history teaches is foredoomed. Now he stands for the divine right of kings; and notwithstanding he is a man of irreproachable character and able, moreover, to show that he is much less autocratic than most of his predecessors, he loses his crown and his head. Again, he stands for the parent country's unlimited power of taxation, and he forfeits his most flourishing colonies. At another period he urges long sufferance as a justification for continuing—even extending—the crime of slavery, and he meets defeat amid slaughter and devastation. No repetition of the lesson will ever teach him to consider what is abstractly right—what ought to be without reference to what is.

But the conservative has to be, in accordance with the law of nature, so poetically announced in the song of Willis in Iolanthe:

Or, as Emerson's prose expresses it—

“The two parties which divide the state—the party of conservatism and that of innovation—are very old and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times....

“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle which conservatism is set to defend is the actual state of things, good or bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate. It must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and the vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophets; while innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success.”

But though doomed to defeat, conservatism is not to be denounced or condemned. It is not without its uses. It often keeps us from following untried paths that open out alluring but end in thickets or quagmires. A brake is sometimes as necessary to safety as motive power is to progress. But the usual tendency of conservatism is to keep the brakes on all the time, causing either stagnation, retrogression, or a smash-up. The real revolutionist is the rock-ribbed conservative. It is the boulder blocking the onward flow of the stream that causes the eddy and the whirlpool.

Those who think on this subject and who really desire the improvement of society—unfortunately a very small class—are divided over the question whether mankind shall progress by the path of individualism or by that of collectivism. Extremists assure us that these paths go in opposite directions, or traverse each other at right angles. The truth is they run parallel; and we have been travelling both, now advancing more on one and then on the other, towards the ultimate goal of humanity—the perfection of society through the elevation of the individual, the perfection of the individual through the improvement of society. Each helps the other; neither can be independent of the other. It often happens that organized society cannot await the slow process of individual perfection. It must accelerate the operation by changing standards and ideals. There is no telling how long it would have required to convince each individual slave-owner of the wrong of human slavery, or each individual mine and factory owner of the wickedness of child-labor. Society had to take the matter in hand and force individual development—in one case by law, in the other by the sword. Many thoughtful persons are raising the question whether society has not more work of this kind ahead of it. There can be no individual perfection or progress under certain social conditions. Ceremonious politeness was not to be expected among the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Starvation has often led to cannibalism among men who would shrink with horror from the thought of it under ordinary conditions. Society can create conditions favorable or unfavorable to the improvement of the individual.

The inevitable outcome of the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the triumph of each in its own proper field.

A line drawn from the past to the present shows the trend of the future. We find this embodying two distinct, and apparently contradictory, tendencies—one towards greater individual freedom, the other towards a constant extension of the principle of cooperation, or collectivism. That is, organized society leaves ever greater freedom to the individual in all those things that concern only him, while at the same time it extends farther and farther its supervision and performance of those things that pertain to the welfare of all, and which society can do for the individual better than he can do for himself. A man may kiss his wife on Sunday without scandal or fear of prosecution; and he may dress in any manner he pleases within the bounds of convention, which is still an unreasoning tyrant. He is generally glad to avail himself of the more convenient water-supply provided by the community; but he may, if he wishes, have a well in his yard, until, with the growth of the city, this becomes a menace to his neighbors' health; then it must be closed. He may still mould his own tallow candles and use no other light if he prefers; but cooperation among consumers supplies him with a much superior illuminant; and when this cooperation is extended to embrace all the citizens—i.e., when gas or electricity is furnished by the municipality, the cost is reduced, and he becomes a partner in the profits.

Of the benefits of municipal cooperation we had a signal illustration in the introduction of municipal sprinkling in St. Louis. Formerly, the occupant of a fifty-foot lot paid a private contractor from $6 to $12 a season, while he suffered from the dust blown from his neighbors' frontage and from unsprinkled streets all over the city. Now the owner of a fifty-foot lot pays about $1 a year and enjoys sprinkled streets throughout the whole city. Municipal cooperation in libraries brings the same kind of benefits. The average well-to-do reader, instead of a five-dollar subscription fee, pays a dollar tax; and for that not only he and his family, but also the families of his neighbors, have access to a superior library. And it is almost as necessary for your comfort that your neighbor's children have access to a library as for your own.

While social evolution tends to relieve the individual of the compulsion of law, and also to lessen the pressure of public opinion, in those affairs that pertain only to his own life, correlatively his action is more and more restricted in so far as it affects his neighbors and society in general—though here, too, law and custom tend more and more to individual freedom. It was once regarded as a public scandal not to go to church; and 50 years ago in St. Louis Unitarians were shunned as suspicious characters. But pari passu with the growth of individual liberty has grown the recognition of the duty of society to see that all persons have equal liberty—to protect the weak against the strong. Nothing in Victoria's reign has done more for the progress of England than the series of acts that have been passed to curb the greed of mine and factory owners, to prevent them from coining the muscle and manhood of Britain into gold—in a way that, at one period, threatened to exhaust the vitality of the race—to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The whole history of mankind is a continuous struggle of the weak and ignorant many to secure the rights withheld from them by the superior strength and cunning of the few. The oppression and injustice of the past are apparent to all; but many of us, like the conservative antagonists of Cobden and Bright, fail to see anything seriously wrong in the present; and, like them, we fear change. But it is the part of wise men to welcome change as the natural order of the universe—to see that it is a change for the better.

It does not by any means follow that every new idea is a good one, that every proposed change would be an improvement. But as progress is the law of the universe, it rests with the old order to show why it should be continued. Wisdom, therefore, urges us to give careful consideration to new ideas, however contrary they may be to prevalent opinions, bearing in mind the frequent lesson of history that “the stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner,” and approaching all questions in the spirit of St. Paul's injunction: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” For all political and social problems, which are the burning questions of to-day, there is, it seems to me, a simple test in Herbert Spencer's “first principle”: “Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.” Legislation that does not square with the self-evident truth and justice of this dictum is bad legislation, and must prove maleficent to the nation, state, or city that enacts it. I need not offer any modern instances.

Reasoning in reverse order, i.e., from effect to cause, we may be sure that when we see in a country abounding in natural resources, as ours is, inhabited by the most intelligent, energetic, and resourceful people the world has ever seen—when we see in such a country millions of willing workers in enforced idleness; when, to account for the idleness and its attendant want and destitution, we are offered the absurdity of “over-production” of the very things for which millions are suffering; when we see men and women who toil not revelling in luxury, while others who labor sixteen hours a day are barely able to keep body and soul together, we may know absolutely, without further investigation, that there is something fundamentally wrong in our social organization.

This is not the time or place to point out these wrongs specifically, or to advance, even in the most general terms, what, after much thought, I believe to be the remedies. I merely urge the thoughtful study of social problems without bias or prejudice. This state of openmindedness is not easy to achieve. We think that we think our own thoughts; but as Tarde, the French psychologist, says: “What the individual hypnotizer is to his sleeping and abnormally plastic subject, such, almost precisely, is society to the waking and normally plastic man.”[7]

On the solution of social problems, Ibsen says: “There is only one thing that avails—to revolutionize people's minds.” This was a difficult task about so plain a matter as the Copernican system, which was opposed by the combined learning and piety of Europe. How much more difficult must it be when the change affects the every-day life of every individual? As Nitti says: “Had the propositions of Euclid affected economic interests they would still appear doubtful hypotheses of arduous solution.”

The public library is destined to play an important part, to exercise an incalculable influence in the solution of the social problems of to-day, and through this on the future of the nation and the race. The wisdom needed for this task is not to be obtained from schools or colleges, but from the higher education of mature minds—the masses of the people—which the public library alone can give. The preparation for this higher education of the masses devolves on the schools and colleges. Their curricula should be so arranged as to arouse “historic consciousness” in the youngest child, to awaken social consciousness, and to provide for its continuous development by starting every boy and girl on a career of self-culture—by matriculating every child in the People's University, the Public Library. In affairs that concern society as a whole, it is better to trust the well-informed common-sense of the people than the learning of the schoolmen.

It is not knowledge of mathematics or physics, or Greek and Latin, or modern languages; it is not the study—academic study—of history, or philosophy, or even political economy, that will solve the great social problems that now confront us. These will help in various degrees, directly or indirectly, some more, some less, some, perhaps, not at all. A knowledge of the general course of history is essential; some acquaintance with philosophy is useful; dogmatic theology serves only to confuse, but the true religion that lies in a vital acceptance of Christ's two commandments as a summary of the law and the prophets—that is the greatest aid of all. Such, however, is the influence of established order on men's minds that no investigation will avail without a determination to take nothing for granted, to re-examine what have been considered basic principles, to accept no postulates that do not square with reason and justice. This cannot be done by confining our reading to the accepted standards of a generation or a century ago. We must keep abreast of the thought of the time; we must keep our eyes and ears, and still more our minds, open; we must scorn no aids to enlightenment; but we must do our own thinking; we must consider the idea, not the source from which it came, remembering that good may come out of Nazareth; we must live up to the motto; “Truth for authority, not authority for truth,” and we must “lend a hand.”

My faith in the efficacy of the education offered by the public library is not without foundation. In more than one case I have seen a course of lectures or the reading of a single book lead to a course of reading in economics and sociology, which has entirely changed points of view. New ideals, higher standards, have made new men with higher lines of action. Their natures have not been changed, but their visions have been clarified.

One of the stock arguments which conservatism always brings out to give a final quietus to any proposal for social reform, is—“Oh, that's impossible; you'd have to change human nature!” This mental attitude, which, I am sorry to say, is the prevailing one with the great majority of mankind, is admirable satirized in some verses which I had great pleasure in printing in the April number of the St. Louis Public Library Magazine:

Yes, great progress and reform can be accomplished without changing human nature. The elemental forces in the heart of man are the same now as in the earliest recorded ages, and they are likely to remain the same for all time to come. We cannot change the elements of man's nature; but by changing conditions we can improve the product of reaction. We can elevate conduct by elevating ideals. There was a time when the man who could wield the heaviest battle-axe was the greatest man; and there are still circles in which Corbett and Fitzsimmons are regarded as the greatest men of the present day. But the men who now excite most general admiration are our “captains of industry,” the men who succeed in getting money and the luxury and power it commands. How shall we elevate our national ideals?

Selfishness is a mainspring of human action. A like motive, desire for happiness, sets men to fighting dogs and to founding hospitals. Nero found pleasure in one way, Marcus Aurelius in another. Charles I. and Louis XVI. were not bad men; but they were controlled by outgrown standards. Elizabeth, Napoleon, Peter, and Catherine of Russia sought their own pleasure in accordance with their personal characters and the standards of their times. But how much higher and purer pleasure the devotion of their talents to the service of their fellowmen brought to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, Cobden, Bright and Gladstone—and John Pounds!

False standards, low ideals, now lead many good men to find their pleasure, not in cruelty, not in sensuality, but in the accumulation of wealth, partly for the luxury, chiefly for the power it brings. “Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.”

With the spread of intelligence and thought, and the consequent elevation of popular ideals, men possessed of millions will not seek to add to their large legitimate gains by legalized robbery from their fellow-citizens; and people calling themselves Christians will not rejoice in the distress and starvation of their fellow-men across the ocean. Men will still be selfish but their selfishness will at least be on a higher plane—less intense, less destructive of essential rights.

How shall we most speedily bring about this desired consummation? By what agency can we most effectively elevate our national ideals? By extending and improving our system of popular education, by reversing the usual order and beginning where school curricula now end, by placing our school-children from their earliest years in close and familiar contact with the life and thought of the race as expressed in literature, by exciting in every child admiration and emulation of the world's true heroes, by feeding the imagination and cultivating the moral faculties, by putting every child into the way of acquiring a social and a historic perspective.

I suppose I am one of those simple-minded visionary optimists of whom Prof. Royce speaks. But I do not “dislike” economic facts in the sense of ignoring them, and I am not blind to the persistence of the elemental forces of human nature. But as the abolition of slavery changed men's mental attitude towards this social crime, without at all changing human nature, just so I believe that the adoption of other social reforms would in a generation cause all men to look with horror and wonder upon social injustice that nearly every one now ignores or regards as irremediable and inevitable. I share Ruskin's scorn of the word “Utopian.” “A thing is either possible or impossible.” As Carlyle says, “The actual final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the ideal. Every noble work is at first impossible.” In the A.L.A. we have heard the word “Utopian,” or its equivalent, on more than one occasion met by the motto, “Hitch your wagon to a star”; and we have seen the impracticable an accomplished fact.

If time permitted I might risk ridicule by presenting some features of the vision that I see with the eye of faith in an all-wise and all-powerful Creater and belief in human perfectibility as an infinite progress.

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