d anarchists by some people. The branch librarian assures me
that the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder
since they have met in the library. It is getting to be literary,
academic, philosophic. Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudicious
repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs and dynamite.

In this catholicity I cannot help thinking that the library as an
educational institution is a step ahead of the school. Most teachers would
resent the imputation of partisanship on the part of the school, and yet
it is surely partisan--in some ways rightly and inevitably so. One cannot
well explain both sides of any question to a child of six and leave its
decision to his judgment. This is obvious; and yet I cannot help thinking
that there is one-sided teaching of children who are at least old enough
to know that there is another side, and that the one-sided teaching of
two-sided subjects might be postponed in some cases until two-sided
information would be possible and proper. Where a child is taught one side
and finds out later that there is another, his resentment is apt to be
bitter; it spoils the educational effect of much that he was taught and
injures the influence of the institution that taught him. My resentment is
still strong against the teaching that hid from me the southern viewpoint
concerning slavery and secession, the Catholic viewpoint of what we
Protestants call the Reformation--dozens of things omitted from textbooks
on dozens of subjects because they did not happen to meet the approval of
the textbook compiler. I am no less an opponent of slavery--I am no less a
Protestant--because I know the other side, but I think I am a better man
for knowing it, and I think it a thousand pities that there are thousands
of our fellow citizens, on all sides of all possible lines, from whom our
educative processes have hid even the fact that there is another side.
This question, as I have said, does not affect the library, and
fortunately need not affect it. And as we are necessarily two-sided in our
book material so we can open our doors to free social or neighborhood use
without bothering our heads about whether the users are Catholics,
Protestants, or Jews; Democrats, Republicans, or Socialists; Christian
Scientists or suffragists. The library hands our suffrage and
anti-suffrage literature to its users with the same smile, and if it hands
the anti-suffrage books to the suffra