ave said, which is such a small fraction of what might be said,
that I am almost ashamed to offer it to you, I have in truth only been
playing the variations on one tune, which is--Draw closer to the library,
as it is trying to draw closer to you. There is no such thing, physicists
tell us, as a one-sided force. Every force is but one aspect of a stress,
which includes also an equal and opposing force. Any two interacting
things in this world are either approaching each other or receding from
each other. So it should be with library and public. A forward movement on
the one hand should necessarily involve one to meet it.

The peculiarity of our modern temper is our hunger for facts--our
confidence that when the facts are known we shall find a way to deal with
them, and that until the facts are known we shall not be able to act--not
even to think. Our ancestors thought and acted sometimes on premises that
seem to us frightfully flimsy--they tried, as Dean Swift painted them in
his immortal satire, to get sunbeams from cucumbers. There are some
sunbeam-chasers among us to-day, but even they recognize the need of real
cucumbers to start with; the imaginary kind will not do. I recently heard
a great teacher of medicine say that the task of the modern physician is
merely to ascertain the facts on which the intelligent public is to act.
How different that sounds from the dicta of the medicine of a past
generation! It is the same everywhere: we are demanding an accurate
survey--an ascertainment of the facts in any field in which action, based
on inference and judgment, is seen to be necessary. Now the library is
nothing more nor less than a storehouse of recorded facts. It is becoming
so more truly and more fully every day, thereby adjusting itself to the
modern temper of which I have already spoken. The library and its users
are coming more closely together, in sympathy, in aims and in action, than
ever before--partly a result and partly a justification for that Homeric
method of popularizing it which has been characterized and condemned as
commercial. The day when the librarian, or the professor, or the clergyman
could retire into his tower and hold aloof from the vulgar herd is past.
The logical result of such an attitude is now being worked out on the
continent of Europe. Not civilizations, as some pessimists are lamenting,
but the forces antagonistic to civilization are there destroying one
another, and there is hope that a