Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/253

Rh and his own self-denials, and most fully receives the punishment 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