ny of whose branch libraries were contributions
from religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and the
Episcopalians. All these now work together harmoniously. I know of nothing
of this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified in
crediting it to the present American tendency to eclecticism.

Turn for a moment to philosophy. What is the philosophical system most
widely known at present as American? Doubtless the pragmatism of William
James. No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regarding
philosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; but
pragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system. It is based on the
character of results. Is something true or false? I will tell you when I
find out whether it works practically or not. Is something right or wrong?
I rely on the same test. Now it seems to me that this is the scheme of the
peasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Juno
or Egyptian Isis or Phoenician Moloch, so long as he got what he wanted.
If a little bit of Schopenhauer works, and some of Fichte; a piece of
Christianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill of
pragmatism. Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true. I am
not criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely asserting
that it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue in
the United States.

It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a list
of all the domains in which this eclecticism--this tendency to select,
combine and blend--has cropped out among us Americans of today. I have
reserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested--the
Public Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree.
The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a
wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any
other part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users look
at us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under
the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our
extravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are
compelled to foot the bills for what we do. But the taxpayers do not seem
to mind. They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing. What
bothers them is that we do not try to do more. When we began timidly to
add branch libraries