THE PUBLIC AND ITS PUBLIC LIBRARY.^ 243 



tions and his own self-denials, and most fully receives the punish- 

 ment of his own indolence and his own prodigality of his own 

 failure to adjust himself to men and things about him. The mass, 

 he says, may restrain the individual who would make an attack 

 on others ; it may refuse to affiliate with the individual who does 

 not do those things which it thinks he should do. For the mass 

 to do. more than this, he says, is so to restrict individual activity 

 and to prevent the play of natural forces as to make impossible 

 the development of the only kind of individuals that can form 

 the ideal society. 



This is stating it crudely. It at least suggests, however, that 

 the advocate of liberty has on his side some of the arguments 

 gained from the study of biology and of history. The former 

 seems to tell us that the fittest have survived in open fight that 

 only by this open fight do those more fit appear ; the latter seems 

 to tell us that the better government governs the least ; that the 

 only wise thing the ruler, whether king or majority, can do for 

 the social organism is to let it alone. 



If it is of doubtful expediency, then, for the sovereign majority 

 to take from the individual by force the means wherewith to 

 maintain a library for the pleasure and edification of all, it is the 

 part of wisdom to see that that library is made, as far as may be, 

 the sure antidote to the possible bane of its origin. It must 

 teach freedom, by its contents and by its administration. It 

 must cultivate the individual. It must add to the joy of life. 

 Always it must truly educate. 



It is in the light of the preceding, perhaps rather doctrinaire, 

 remarks that the following notes have been written and should 

 be read. 



The public owns its public library. This fact sheds much 

 light on the question of public library management. It means 

 that the public library must be fitted to public needs. It must 

 suit its community. It must do the maximum of work at the 

 minimum of expense. It must be an economical educational 

 machine. It must give pleasure, for only where pleasure is is 

 any profit taken. It must change in its manner of administration 

 with the new time, the new relations of books to men and of men 

 to books. It need not altogether forget the bookworm or the 

 belated historian, and it can take note here and there of the lover 

 of the dodos and the freaks among printed things. But its prime 

 purpose is to place the right books in the proper hands, to get 

 more joyful and wise thoughts into the minds of its owners. The 

 means of its support are taken by force from the pockets of the 

 competent and provident ; this fact should never be lost sight of. 

 It lives in a measure by the sword. It can justify itself in this 

 manner of securing its support only by putting into practice the 



