It is no accident that I make this appeal for sympathy and aid to a club composed of women.  The bonds between the modern public library and the modern woman’s club have been particularly strong in this country.  The two institutions have grown up together, making their way against suspicion, contempt and hostility, aided by the same public demand, and now, when both are recognized as elements in the intellectual strength of our nation, they are rendering mutual service.  The club turns to the library daily.  Hitherto the library has turned to the club only in some emergency—­a bill to be passed, an appropriation to be made, an administration to be purified.  I have tried to show you how, apart from these great services, which no one would think of minimizing, the women of this country, as citizens, can uphold the hands of the library daily.  Ours is a government of public opinion, and in the formation of that opinion there is no more powerful element than the sentiment of our women, especially when organized in such bodies as yours.

“To be aristocratic in taste and democratic in service,” says Bliss Perry, “is the privilege and glory of the public library.”  In appealing thus to both your aristocracy and your democracy, I feel, then, that I have not gone astray.

SOME TENDENCIES OF AMERICAN THOUGHT[13]

[13] Read before the New York Library Association at Squirrel Inn,
Haines Falls, September 28, 1915.

The modern American mind, like modern America, itself, is a melting pot.  We are taking men and women of all races and fusing them into Americans.  In the same way we are taking points of view, ideas, standards and modes of action from whatever source we find them, combining them and fusing them into what will one day become American thoughts and standards.  We are thus combining the most varied and opposing things—­things that it would seem impossible to put together.  Take our modern American tendency in government, for instance.  Could there be two things more radically different than despotism and democracy?—­the rule of the one and the rule of the many?  And yet I believe that we are taking steps toward a very successful combination of the two.  Such a combination is essentially ancient.  No despotism can hold its own without the consent of the governed.  That consent may be unwilling and sooner or later it is then withheld, with the result that a revolution takes place and the despot loses his throne—­the oldest form of the recall.  Every despotism is thus tempered by revolution, and Anglo-Saxon communities have been ready to exercise such a privilege on the slightest sign that a despotic tendency was creeping into their government.