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the librarian of Congress, the vice-president, Mr. Wellman, Mr. Bowker, and myself had a very satisfactory interview with the Postmaster-General on the subject of books and the parcel post, and future prospects with reference to cheaper rates on books; and I am sure we may say to you that the post-office department is in sympathy with our aspirations in that regard, and will coöperate with us as far as possible.

When the first speaker of the afternoon sent me the title of his paper, he had an alternative title in Latin. I was so surprised and overjoyed that I could read his Latin without a lexicon, that I wrote to him and expressed my gratification that he had used Latin which one of even my rusty Latinity could read. Since I could read it so easily he evidently concluded there was something the matter with it, so he eliminated the Latin and gave the title of his paper as simply "Prestige," practically defying me to utter any platitudes on the subject. Since he has not divulged what he is to talk about, I shall have to leave it to him to explain it to you. The librarian of the Newberry library in Chicago needs no introduction to this audience. I am pleased, however, to have the opportunity to present to the Association, Mr. W. N. C. CARLTON.

PRESTIGE

Although not easily lending itself to precise definition, prestige is a social fact of universal importance. One of its dictionary definitions is "ascendancy based on recognition of power," but this is incomplete and unsatisfactory. As Dr. Johnson said of the camel, "It is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it." It is an intangible quality the possession of which brings recognition and power. It connotes success, distinction, and high consideration. The popular mind is quick to recognize its presence and to accord it deference and respect. Rightly understood, it is an invaluable means of maintaining and

spreading true values. It is a potency without which, "neither truth nor untruth, neither the good nor the bad, neither the beautiful nor the ugly, can succeed permanently and in the face of large numbers." My concern with it here is as an invaluable aid to power and effectiveness in accomplishing our educational and cultural aims.

We are familiar with the prestige that everywhere surrounds inherited wealth, high rank, and illustrious ancestry. It also attaches itself to ideas, to institutions, and to causes which have furthered man's upward progress. It is certain to be won through conspicuous success in statesmanship, in the arts of war, in commerce, in science, and in the fine arts. Institutions gain prestige through the character or genius of certain men associated with them. Great as is the prestige which surrounds the chief magistracy of this nation, I cannot but feel that something additional has been added to it by reason of the fact that he who now holds the presidential office represents scholarship and learning as well as statecraft. And in this place, before this audience, it may not be unfitting for me to express the conviction that America today possesses one national institution whose prestige as a seat of learning has been created and made international by the vision and genius of one man-Herbert Putnam.

Another illustration of prestige comes inevitably to mind: Our fathers and grandfathers knew it at first hand, felt it and lived in its atmosphere, but this generation knows of it chiefly through the pages of literature. It is that prestige which, in the smaller and simpler communities of a few generations ago, surrounded the clergyman, the physician, the lawyer, and the teacher. These men, in their several communities, represented tradition, science and the Humanities. They were the repositories and representatives of the best that the past had handed down to their present; they kept its great ideals of thought and conduct alive in the imagina

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tions of their contemporaries. They were seats of authority and molders of opinion. They were leaders in the civic thought and action of their day. The elders sought their counsel, and the young men were led and inspired by their lives and example. It is no exaggeration to say that, collectively, they were perhaps the most potent influence, prior to the Civil War, in forming the moral, political, and intellectual ideals of the American people. After the Civil War this prestige was largely lost. We have as yet created nothing to take its place; we have developed no social classes or groups whose members serve and lead us as did those men of aforetime. And our country, our age, and we are infinitely the poorer for it.

When once attained, prestige persists, both in the case of ideas and of men, even unto the third and fourth generations of those who originally won it. Always and everywhere those who possess it have a marked ascendancy over their fellows, an ascendancy which enables them to wield vast powers, exert wide influence, secure a respectful hearing, attain high positions, and achieve the most positive results. History proves it a magic quality greatly to be desired.

You are, I imagine, wondering what all this chatter about prestige has to do with libraries, or with librarians. Well, for the purposes of this paper, it has everything to do with them. During the past few years I have found myself asking, Do librarians possess prestige? For what kind of "ascendancy based on power" are they notable? With what traditions and ideals are they associated in the public mind of our time? To what extent are they influencing men and opinions of the day? Is their prestige, if they have one, generally recognized and respected? To these questions I have not been able to return entirely satisfactory answers. I do not feel certain that we possess an "ascendancy based on power" of any sort, or that we exert a large influence on contemporary thought. It is not apparent to me that the

social mind of our day, either in this country or in Great Britain, associates us with any outstanding ideal or activity possessing recognized prestige. We do not yet seem to have won from it an acceptance of us as authoritative leaders in the intellectual life of the nation. It may be that we are too young a class to have had time to acquire ascendancy and power over the public mind. It may be that the conditions and temper of our time are unfavorable to our attaining social power and intellectual leadership. We have a natural relationship with the historic professions of law, theology, and teaching. But, as I have said, much of their once great moral and intellectual prestige has been lost. It may not be surprising, therefore, if we have failed to achieve prestige in a time when these more ancient but allied professions have been desperately struggling to save a remnant of theirs. The truth is that the Time-Spirit, in a mood of cruel irony, has let loose on our age, to a degree and extent hitherto unknown in modern history, a succession of extremely destructive tendencies. These are: a general flouting of authority in matters political, intellectual, spiritual, and social; the rejection of discipline, mental or moral; an inordinate passion for the physical enjoyment of the present moment; and a stubborn belief in the utilitarian or materialistic test for all things. Every one of these tendencies is hostile to what the learned professions represent; every one of them is inimical to genuine progress in civilization, culture, and refinement. The immediate duty confronting all who are identified with religion, law, and education is to seek to recover the ascendancy lost during the last fifty years and to regain their former influential prestige. We are fond of saying that libraries and library work are an important part of the educational machinery of society and that their aims and purposes are complementary to those of the teaching profession. If we believe this, we, together with the other professions which represent authority, spirituality and learning, must

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labor for the complete reëstablishment of the power and prestige of religion, law and the Humanities. And, to be effective aids, librarians should have a prestige of their own which the social mind shall instinctively recognize and respect.

I believe that the best and most enduring prestige requires a relationship with the past, an indelible association with something ancient and historic, something which has proved its lasting worth to mankind. I should like to insist a little on the fundamental importance of rooting our mental life deeply in the best that the past has to give us, and of retaining "the flavor of what was admirably done in past generations." The past is as needful to a wholesome, sane, intellectual life as rich soil is to growing trees and ripening grain. Although, as Shelley said a hundred years ago, the world may be weary of the past, it cannot shake itself clear of it.

Many of you will recall that passage in one of Sir Walter Besant's books on London, in which he compares ancient Westminster with modern East London. It admirably illustrates the thought which is in my mind at this moment. "Westminster," he writes, "is essentially an old historic city with its roots far down in the centuries of the past: once a Roman station; once the market place of the island; once a port; always a place of religion and unction; for six hundred years the site of the King's House; for five hundred years the seat of Parliament; for as many the home of our illustrious dead. But with East London there is no necessity to speak of history. This modern city, the growth of a single century-nay, of half a century-has no concern and no interest in the past; its present is not affected by its past; there are no monuments to recall the past; its history is mostly a blank-that blank which is the history of woods and meadows, arable and pasture land, over which the centuries pass, making no more mark than the breezes of yesterday have made on the waves and waters of the ocean." "91 The man or the mind without

deep, strength-giving roots in the past is an East London type, not a Westminster type. Of all contemporary professions none has such opportunity as our own to make Westminster its ideal rather than East London. Into our hands has been committed the care, preservation, and dissemination of the means whereby a knowledge of the past has been preserved, and we cannot divest ourselves of the responsibility for knowing its meaning and realizing its value as an aid to rational progress. The memorable ages of former times have been conspicuous debtors to the ages that preceded them and they have acknowledged the debt. They have not been generations which felt, as Robert Herrick says this generation feels, that they could "go it alone," without reference to the past. "The Romano-Hellenic world lived upon the Greek literature of the times from Homer downwards and based education upon it. In the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages men were constantly looking back to the ancient world as a sort of golden age and were cherishing every fragment that had come down to them therefrom. The scholars and thinkers of the Renaissance who obtained those Greek books for which their predecessors had vainly sighed, drew from those books their inspiration. It was they that lit up the fires of new literary effort in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and Britain.' And in their turn the great spirits of Elizabethan age, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, etc., lighted their torches from those held out by the men of the Continental Renaissance, and passed on to us the unquenchable fires originally lighted in that marvelous Greece of the years between 600 and 400 B. C. As Bacon so wisely says in his Advancement of Learning (Book I, c.5): "Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should take a stand thereupon and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to make progression." We cannot, then, live or think or work

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intelligently in the present unless we understand, and know what has been done in the past, and which of its ideas, ideals, truths and examples are still valid and applicable to our age and conditions. And I venture to submit that the ancient heritage with which the library profession should unmistakably connect itself, and association with which would give it a lasting prestige, is no other than Humanism and the Humanities: those precious depositories of what is best in man's past, and matchless instruments for uplifting him in the present. Ideals derived from the Humanities should inspire our daily work; our object should be to inculcate a desire for them in the minds of the people. They should color every activity with which we are concerned. Unless we make this the very heart and center of our striv ing, we shall never be other than a petty, office-holding class, a bureaucracy embalmed in a dull, uninspiring routine. Without Humanistic ideals and learning we cannot have a prestige truly worthy of our work.

Our association with the Humanities should begin with our earliest courses of study. The nature and kind of education required for entrance upon a profession have a fundamental bearing upon the quality of that profession's prestige. The experience of a quarter century has convinced me that the education of the librarian must be based on the most solid and comprehensive foundations and that it must not be inferior in quality or discipline or duration to that required of students in the best law, medical, and theological schools. In the high school and in the university, the course of study pursued by us should be largely a revivified form of the so-called "classical course" of a generation or two ago. Our school years from at least the age of fourteen to twenty-one should be almost entirely devoted to the study of Greek, Latin, mathematics, modern languages, philosophy, history, and literature. These are not only the seven keys to Humane Learning; they are prime es

sentials to the highest order of professional work. They are things, as Plato says, "without some use or knowledge of which a man cannot become a god to the world, nor a spirit, nor yet a hero, nor able earnestly to think and care for man."

We must learn Greek because it is the key to our most precious intellectual heritage; because, in the words of Sir Frederick Kenyon, "it makes for freedom from convention, bold experiments, and the discipline of sanity and good taste." Greece won for our world freedom in all its branches-freedom for society, freedom for the individual, freedom for thought. Out of the world of classic antiquity springs the intellectual inheritance of the western world. "The belief that Hellenism is in some sense a permanent need of the human spirit has proved a perpetually recurring theme in western literature."

"To be entirely ignorant of the Latin language," wrote Schopenhauer, "is like being in a fine country on a misty day. The horizon is extremely limited. Nothing can be seen clearly except that which is quite close; a few steps beyond, everything is buried in obscurity. But the Latinist has a wide view."

Philosophy, "the study of how men think and reason, ought to be the crowning study, the last word in any education worth the name." " In philosophy, man's reason reaches its supreme expression of the human striving for what is ideally best. This is to know oneself and one's fellows, the world and God, in a more profound manner, and so as to satisfy the entire intellectual, ethical, æsthetical, and religious needs of the soul.5

An intimate knowledge of those modern European languages which have a classic literature is necessary for us all. French, German, Italian, and Spanish are of primary importance both as sources of enlightenment and as working tools. "Half the good things of the human mind are

3Quoted by Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 73.

Allen Upward: The New Word, p. 80. "Adapted from G. T. Ladd.

outside English altogether," says H. G. Wells. Another half-century may see the literary languages of Russia and the Scandinavian countries taking their places as parts of the necessary equipment in general culture.

While mathematics may and does serve many purposes of utility, Humanism views it as a key to the temple of the higher intellectual life. "The true spirit of delight," says Bertrand Russell, "the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement."⚫

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"History is for time what geography is for space." It is the map on which mankind's struggles and triumphs are drawn. One of the most delightful of recent essays on history is that which gives the title to Mr. George Macaulay Trevelyan's Clio, a Muse; and Other Essays. He points out that to many persons history is the principal source of the ideas that inspire their lives; that the presentation of ideals and heroes from other ages is perhaps the most important educative function of history; and that a valuable effect of its study is to train the mind to take a just view of political problems. History educates the minds of men by causing them to reflect upon the past.

Literature, it has been said, is the chief ornament of humanity. The omission of the great literatures from any rational course of study is unthinkable. An eminent German is authority for the statement that of the number of books written in any language, only about one in one hundred thousand forms a part of its real and permanent literature. Other eminent Germans have laboriously calculated that the number of separate works issued from the Philosophical Essays.

"Bertrand Russell: p. 73.

Schopenhauer.

press since the invention of printing, reaches a grand total of from ten to fifteen million titles. The division of ten million by one hundred thousand results in the gratifying discovery that the quotient is none other than our old friend the "hundred best books." Here we have mathematical proof that it is possible for any intelligent person to acquaint himself with the entire canon of what is best and permanent in the world's literature. This best includes only those supreme things which are independent of time or country, those transcendent creations of human genius the understanding of which uplifts the mind and expands the soul. "Since Virgil," said James Russell Lowell, "there have been at most but four cosmopolitan authors-Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe." Starting with these and their two predecessors, the Bible and Homer, you may make up your hundred as you like. My point is that the librarian above all others should have first-hand acquaintance with the serene summits of human expression.

It is my belief that with an education covering the ground and including the discipline which the foregoing implies, and with the technical training of the library school superimposed upon it, one would begin library work with a prestige fully equal to that with which the graduates of the Harvard Law School, the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Union Theological Seminary, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology enter upon their several professions. Add gifts of personality to this mental equipment, and the individual would inevitably be a dynamic influence in the institution or community whose service he enters. With a generation or two of librarians thus trained in the Humanities, the solid foundation of intellectual prestige would be laid. I would therefore seriously propose the Humanities as vocational training for librarians.

It is a wise saying that "definitions are dangerous," and I hesitate to embark upon the hazardous adventure of defining so

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