Excerpt from Public Libraries, Their Development and Future Organization

It was a wonderful system - as a piece of elaborate mechanism but it was a system that was deliberately fashioned for the purpose of turning out certain types of mind and character. If you have read that brilliant and horrible production of the genius of Mr. Wells - The Island ofdr. Moreau - you will remember how the wonderful gifts of the great scientist were devoted to the creation of repulsive simulacra of humanity. When we see the great kultur machine of Germany working at high pressure for generations and ending with the production of scientists whose supreme achievement is the introduction of the most repulsive savagery into the conduct of war, and of philosophers whose function is to justify and even to applaud the work of their confreres, we can hardly help feeling that in this, as in other directions, Mr. Wells has shown himself to be the most successful of our prophets, and that in Dr. Moreau he has shown us the logical outcome of German methods in education.

It is, to my mind, one of the greatest virtues of the library move ment as an element in national education that it is necessarily an in strument of liberty and the enemy of over-rigid systematization. Our one aim is to put freely before those whom we serve all that is best in the world's literature. The student may perhaps be too narrowly, too specially trained in his academic routine. We supply the best of anti dotes when we invite him to wander among our bookshelves and to decide for himself what he will read!

We are entitled to believe that it is in our power to play an impor tant part in strengthening those two elements in our intellectual training - freedom and morality - which will preserve us from the dangers into which the mind of Germany has been led by its drilled and regimented professors.

There was a feeling in the early days of the war that we could afford to close down such things as public libraries and art galleries. That feeling is vanishing, and there is evidence ofa distinct change of attitude in the public mind. We are beginning to realize the short-sightedness Of such a policy, and so far from closing down the libraries, we find people beginning to consider in what ways these and similar institutions can be made to serve more effectively both the intellectual and practical needs of the community.

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