and foreign customs vanish, its theaters and festivals. Representing our earlier immigration the plays of Harrigan have gone with German tragedy and comedy, gone, too, the German and Irish comedians of the old variety stage, gone with the generation that could understand their fun. Even the Italians' picturesqueness is on the wane. Their street pageants are not what they were. The music of the colony dies-Tannenbaum and Wearing of the Green. And in spite of every effort its speech is lost.

It is surprising how quickly a language is lost. I heard the other day a story of the Italian editor of one of the most important Italian papers in the United States. I perhaps should fairly characterize that paper by saying that its spirit is if not anti-American, at least very aggressively pro-Italian, very strong on the side of the Italian language, its sanctity, purity and beauty. This gentleman was involved in a libel suit which took him to Rome, where his case has recently been tried. The papers adverse to him have reported with great glee how during the course of that trial the judge turned to him and said, "Sir, will you have the kindness to speak in Italian, because as it is, it is impossible for us to understand you."

But we were talking of the reading of German books. The generation of the great mass of our German immigrants is, of course, rapidly passing-so rapidly that by the last census, in spite of an immigration of 700,000 for the decade, our total German-born population decreased by over 300,000. This goes far to explain a stationary circulation. But it is also clear that these same people, the most literate, and the most tenacious of their national culture of all our earlier immigrants, have come so far into the practice of the English language, forgetting their own, that further increase of German readers in our libraries is hardly to be looked for. It is plain that the menace to us is the complete disappearance of the foreign languages now current. For his own use and

self-respect the immigrant should be encouraged not to forget his origins. We should no more be jealous of Italian or Jewish or Polish societies than we are of St. Andrew, or St. Nicholas, St. George or Holland societies.

It is important for the immigrant to learn English more rapidly, and the library can greatly help in this. It is also important that the knowledge of foreign languages should be seriously cultivated among us. It could now easily be made a national accomplishment, as it is in many countries of the continent. Our great cosmopolitan nation should be in direct and immediate touch with the science and social progress and literature of other great nations. We should plant in this vigorous soil of ours their love and understanding of art and music. Here again the library should greatly serve us.

But such results as those attained in New York with the foreign-born only come as the consequence of hard and earnest work. There are difficulties aplenty in the way. Our foreign-born work. ing men and women oftentimes know nothing even of the existence of the li brary, or they have a strange fear to enter, and need much persuasion before they can believe that they will be welcome visitors in such splendid buildings. Often, too, they seem to fear that the library may be connected with a church that is trying to proselytize them, or that some advantage may be taken of them. They need to learn that the library, like the school, is non-sectarian and non-political; that it is the property of the public, and that full privilege of it belongs to every man and woman and reading child. For this reason their priests and rabbis make the librarians' most helpful friends. Once the immigrant workman is persuaded to enter the library, he needs immediate personal attention. He needs to have the different rooms of the library in some way explained, the few simple rules given him to read in his own language. Index cards are impossible to him. The open shelf is generally almost useless. He knows

little or nothing of the proper use of books; often he has never even handled one. He requires the librarian's aid in the mysteries of selecting and registering books. In short, he requires much painstaking individual help.

But how bring the immigrant to the library? In a number of places, very ambitiously, lists have been made, classified by nationalities, of all the foreign-born families living within the radius served by the library; and to each family an attractive postal card notice has been sent. But in many of our cities such work would be an almost impossible task. In such cases, and generally, very effective publicity has been found in the distribution of cards and leaflets bearing lists of appealing books. These have been sent to the multitude of national societies and clubs of various kinds that exist, as well as to drug, stationery and grocery stores, to the rooms of trade unions and to factories. Many librarians are regularly sending boxes of books to such very practical distributing centers. And public schools, night schools, parochial schools are being pressed more and more widely into the service, and the teachers' help very effectively claimed.

In some of the New York branches rooms have been assigned for the use of literary and historical societies, and here meetings with music have been held for the discussion of literature, history, folklore and social questions. By one admirable and popular plan a special visit is invited of a group of men and women of the same nationality. The librarian receives them and one of their own countrymen explains in their native tongue the privileges of the library. Most of our foreign friends are used to being read to, and an adaptation of the story hour has brought excellent results. It has proved fruitful in the independent and more careful reading of books, and has sometimes directly opened the way to the formation of library clubs.

In New York, also, lessons in English have been given, the library itself often

supplying the textbooks needed. This has promptly caused a greater demand for simple books in English. Librarians report that every effort such as these described not only increases membership and revives the use of cards that had fallen into disuse, but gives a profitable opportunity for intensive study of the neighborhood.

Successful experiments of great variety have been made in providing evening entertainments organized directly by the library. These have included simple lectures, often illustrated by the stereopticon. Very popular among these lectures have been those on the agricultural opportunities of our country.

No greater service can be rendered either to the country or to the immigrant than the agricultural distribution of people who really wish to go back to the soil. It is astonishing how wide is the gulf that exists between our industrial life and our agricultural life, so wide that these people rarely come to know anything of our farms or of American farming life and its opportunities. Sometimes I have thought if they have any concept at all of even the geographical greatness of this country they must think that this continent of 3,000 miles is covered with one unending line of tenements. For one day I saw an Italian woman looking at some roses in the window of a florist in Bleecker street, and as I came up beside her she turned in a friendly way and smiled at me, and said in Italian, "How very beautiful they are." "But," she added, "they must be very expensive." I said, "Oh no, why do you think they are expensive?" "Why," she said, "because they have to bring them all the way from Italy, you know. No roses grow in this country."

There have been addresses by men, often leading men, of different nationalities to those of their own speech; musical entertainments, vocal and instrumental; dramatic recitations, with national music on the phonograph; exhibitions of photo

graphs of Italian art and lace. As many mothers have children too young to leave alone, there is the suggestive instance of the library at Mount Vernon, that has invited parents to bring their little ones to the children's room, where they were separately entertained.

Emphatically it is a work that is fast growing, spreading usefully over the country.

Two instances I wish to cite. One, the humblest, of a little workingman's library that was started in an Altoona kitchen in 1912, a library that started with ten books in a soap box. I was told that when these foreign-born workingmen first came they did not always take off their hats as they entered the kitchen, and their faces and hands were not always clean. But there was a rapid improvement in those respects, and at the end of two years that little library has grown to have 560 books, distributed among six branches, with a circulation of 300 books weekly.

Then take the most ambitious instance. To develop this work efficiently within the borders of the state, Massachusetts through its free public library commission is carefully organizing effort, learning the exact location of the foreign colonies, their nationalities and library facilities. The active interest of the leaders of the various groups has been secured; and with the help of a traveling secretary specially provided by the new law to take up this educational work, the results achieved within a single year have been so very promising that it is hoped these efforts may be greatly extended. And where one state has so practically led the way, others must soon follow.

All this reveals the broad field of serv ice now opening to our libraries. It is a field in which we need the help of everyone who believes in what we are doing. Some of our immigrants are Americans by right of the spirit, if not of birth. I will tell you of one:

He was a little wizened, squint-eyed, old man. He told me one day he came to

America because of Lincoln, and I asked him how that was. He said he was born on the shores of the sea of Azof, and that as a boy he heard this story of Tolstoi: That Tolstoi was once traveling in the Caucasus, and having the opportunity to speak, and being very fond of speaking, he spoke to a Tartar tribe through an interpreter. He was at that time very much interested in Napoleon. So he spoke of Napoleon and other great war captains. When he had finished the Tartar chieftain said, "Now, will you be good enough to tell my children of a man who was far greater than any of these men, of a man who was so great that he could even forgive his enemies?" When Tolstoi asked him who that was he said, "Abraham Lincoln." So this man came to America, and beside his telephone in his little shop in New York, there are the two great speeches pasted on the wall, and very old and grimy they are. I asked him about that. "Oh," he said, "I learned them quick. But when I am waiting for a telephone call I let my eye go over them, and you know I always find something new and something fine. It is like a man who looks into one point of the heavens all the time, he ends by discovering a new star."

Our foreigners are not all like my Russian friend, and yet for all, slowly or rapidly, their life merges with ours.

We are apt to forget that a man becomes an American, that his blood becomes American when the judge signs his second citizenship paper. Whether he becomes a good American or a bad American depends in some measure upon ourselves. The great virtues and ideals that we are fond of thinking characteristically our own are often equally the national ideals of other lands. The Pole has a wonderful tradition and a land, yet like the Jew is without a country. Patrie or Vaterland, it is the same. Italy, too, has its great cult of patriotism, that sum of all noble national qualities that it calls Italianitá. But Italianitá and Americanism are hard to distinguish in a moral

definition.

And if we find in America some special glory and leading, even some tang of the air, that no other land could give, we may be sure that our nation, for all the races of our origin, will never become great on its cosmopolitan plan, unless we respect and nourish the culture and all the precious heritage of the centuries, developed by other countries at such heavy sacrifice and brought us, sometimes humbly and indirectly, by the millions of our immigrants.

President ANDERSON: The subject of libraries for rural communities has always interested the members of this Association, and we feel that we are this evening to have the subject elucidated from a new point of view which will be both helpful and instructive. The United States Commissioner of Education hardly needs a formal introduction to this body. However, it gives me great pleasure to present to you Dr. P. P. CLAXTON.

LIBRARIES FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES

The duties of the Bureau of Education and of the Commissioner of Education of the United States are to make such investigations and give such information to the people of the United States as will assist them in establishing and maintaining better schools and school systems, and ctherwise to assist in promoting education among the people. The library and the librarian are helpful in both, and without the help of these neither can be done very successfully.

The school is not the only agency of education, nor is it the only agency supplementary to the home. In the United States children attend school on an average of 5,000 hours; children in country communities attend school probably about 4,000 hours. Between birth and the age of 21 there are 184,000 and some odd hours in the life of a child. If children sleep an average of 10 hours a day, probably enough, approximately 109,000 waking hours remain between birth and 21,

5,000 hours in school (for country children 4,000 hours), and more than 100,000 waking hours out of school, less than 5 per cent of the conscious waking life of the child in school. If we represent the life of the child from birth to 21 by an oblong surface of 184 units, 109 of these units then represent the conscious waking life of the child and 5 of the units represent the school life of the average American child. Four of the units represent the school life of the average country child. This helps us to realize the very small part which school life is of the total life of the child. The child in the city of Washington who attends school every hour that school is in session is in school only 900 hours in the year. There are 8,760 hours in the year; the children of Washington who attend regularly and promptly are in school 900 hours and out of school 7,860 hours; 8,760 and 7,860 sound so nearly alike that one can hardly tell the difference.

Only a small part of the education of any individual is obtained in school. The home was the primitive institution of education; then came the church, the school, and the other supplementary agencies, among them the library. The teacher in the school deals with a small group of subjects in a narrow and formal way. According to the American method lessons are learned and said from textbooks, and textbooks are not books in the best sense.

Neither is the teacher in the school a teacher in the highest and best sense. All teachers may be divided into two classes. This division into two classes may indeed be made in several ways. First, there are teachers made of clay, and teachers who have had the breath of life breathed into them. Every superintendent of schools knows teachers of both classes. In one room he finds a teacher made of clay, whom he goes up against with a dull thud and who sticks worse than Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby. In another room he finds a teacher whose soul is on fire. She has had the breath of life breathed into her. Instead of the thud, there is resilience. But there

is a more important division still. This division is into first-hand teachers and second-hand teachers. The first-hand teachers are those whom I like to call the kings and priests to God and humanity. They are those who out of the exhaustless quarry of the unknown bring to the surface and give definite shape to some new block; those who listen to and interpret the still small voices; those who gain at first hand a clearer vision and stronger grasp of the eternal verities than most of us are capable of; those who stand on the mountain tops and catch the glow of the ever-dawning new day; those who, a little more finely organized than most of us, are able to feel the heart-throb and pulse-beat of the world and of humanity; those clear-sighted individuals who can see a little deeper into nature and human life than the rest of us and who by directing our gaze teach us to see more than we otherwise would; those who serve as the mouthpieces for civilizations, races, and nationalities. You have heard of the man who said he liked to talk to himself for two good reasons; first he liked to hear a wise man talk, and second he liked to talk to a wise man; both conditions were fulfilled when he held converse with himself. The world is much like this man. It has little time to listen to you or to me, or to most of us, but occasionally this wise old world has something to say and is filled with the desire to reveal itself to itself, and then it chooses as its spokesman a man of the kind I have described, an original teacher, a first-hand teacher. It may be a Homer, voicing all the best of the civilization and philosophy, the art and the idealism of the Greeks before they were fully developed and before the Greeks themselves had become generally conscious of themselves; or it may be a Dante, voice of fourteen dumb centuries; or a Shakespeare, revealing Europe to itself; or a Goethe, by divine right poet of the universe and prophet of the ages that are to come; or it may be one of smaller caliber, but of the same race with these. Men like these the world

chooses when it has something worth while to say, and then it is willing to stop and listen. These men have usually obeyed, in some degree at least, the injunction of Carlyle, and in God's name have expressed whatever thought or infinitesimal part of a thought they have had to express. Those who have had anything to say have said it and recorded it in some more or less permanent form. Through the ages the sifting process goes on, the wheat is sifted from the chaff, and the chaff is burned with fire unquenchable. This sifted grain, these treasured records in books, form the real wealth of the world, and it is in the keeping of the libraries and librarians.

We school-teachers belong to the class of second-hand teachers. We have little of our own to teach. We are not the discoverers of new truth. We bring up little or nothing from the great quarry of the unknown. We seldom even give definite form to any unhewn block. We do not push back the walls of cosmic darkness. We gain little new insight into life and nature. The still small voices make few original revelations of the eternal verities through us. The world does not hold communion with itself through us. We do not stand at the altars of life and nature as kings and priests to God and humanity. Even if for a moment we stand on the mountain tops, we do not catch the springing light of the new day, but the fading light of the day that is gone. We are peddlers, purveyors of knowledge, distributing to those who are willing to buy, and trying to persuade, cajole, or force those who will not. The schoolteacher can therefore do nothing better than to introduce children to the firsthand teachers, the teachers of the world to whom we all go to school, so that when school days are over-all too early for most children-they may continue under the tuition of these first-hand teachers in the larger school of life.

The best work school-teachers can do, therefore, is not in putting children