ritualistic mediums in the best sense--the bearers of authentic
messages from all the good and great of past or present time; only with
us, no turning on of the light, no publicity however glaring, will break
the spell or do otherwise than aid, for whether we succeed or fail,
whether we live or die, those messages, recorded as they are in books,
will stand while humanity remains.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, AND THE SOCIAL CENTER MOVEMENT[7]

[7] Read before the National Education Association.

The center of a geometrical figure is important, not for its size and
content, but for its position--not for what it is in itself, but for its
relations to the other elements of the figure. And words used with derived
meanings are used best when their original significations are kept in
mind. The business center of a city does not contain all of that city's
commercial activity; when we speak of the church as a religious center, we
do not mean that there is to be no religious activity in the home or in
other walks of life; as for the center of population of a large and
populous country, it may be out in the prairie where neither man nor his
dwellings are to be seen. All these centers are what they are because of
certain relationships. It is so with a social center. But social
relationships cover a wide field. The relationships of business, of
religion, even of mere co-existence, are all social. May we have a center
for so wide a range of activities? Even the narrower relations of business
or of religion tend to form subsidiary groups and to multiply subsidiary
centers. In a large city we may have not only a general business center
but centers of the real estate business, of the hardware or textile
trades, and so on. Our religious affiliations condense into denominational
centers.

In the district of a large city where newly arrived foreign immigrants
gather, you will be shown the group of blocks where the Poles or the
Hungarians have segregated themselves from the rest, and even within
these, the houses where dwell families from a particular province or even
from one definite city or village. Man is social but he is socially
clannish, and the broadest is not so much he who refuses to recognize
these clan or caste relationships as he who enters into the largest number
of them--he who keeps in touch with his childhood home, has a wide
acquaintance among those of his own religious faith and of his chosen
bus