way against suspicion,
contempt and hostility, aided by the same public demand, and now, when
both are recognized as elements in the intellectual strength of our
nation, they are rendering mutual service. The club turns to the library
daily. Hitherto the library has turned to the club only in some
emergency--a bill to be passed, an appropriation to be made, an
administration to be purified. I have tried to show you how, apart from
these great services, which no one would think of minimizing, the women of
this country, as citizens, can uphold the hands of the library daily. Ours
is a government of public opinion, and in the formation of that opinion
there is no more powerful element than the sentiment of our women,
especially when organized in such bodies as yours.

"To be aristocratic in taste and democratic in service," says Bliss Perry,
"is the privilege and glory of the public library." In appealing thus to
both your aristocracy and your democracy, I feel, then, that I have not
gone astray.

SOME TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN THOUGHT[13]

[13] Read before the New York Library Association at Squirrel Inn,
Haines Falls, September 28, 1915.

The modern American mind, like modern America, itself, is a melting pot.
We are taking men and women of all races and fusing them into Americans.
In the same way we are taking points of view, ideas, standards and modes
of action from whatever source we find them, combining them and fusing
them into what will one day become American thoughts and standards. We are
thus combining the most varied and opposing things--things that it would
seem impossible to put together. Take our modern American tendency in
government, for instance. Could there be two things more radically
different than despotism and democracy?--the rule of the one and the rule
of the many? And yet I believe that we are taking steps toward a very
successful combination of the two. Such a combination is essentially
ancient. No despotism can hold its own without the consent of the
governed. That consent may be unwilling and sooner or later it is then
withheld, with the result that a revolution takes place and the despot
loses his throne--the oldest form of the recall. Every despotism is thus
tempered by revolution, and Anglo-Saxon communities have been ready to
exercise such a privilege on the slightest sign that a despotic tendency
was creeping into their government.

It is not remarkable, then, that