ying to
change that policy, even by argument. Most of them would rather write a
letter to a newspaper, complaining of a book's absence, than to ask the
librarian to buy it. Organizations--civil, religious, scientific,
political, artistic--have usually let us severely alone, where their
influence, if they should come into touch with the library, would surely
be for good--would be exerted along the line of morality, of more careful
book selection, of judicial mindedness instead of one-sidedness.

Let us trust that influences along this line--if we are to have influences
at all--may gain a foothold before the opposite forces--those of sordid
commercialism, of absurdities, of falsities, of all kinds of
self-seeking--find out that we are worth their exploitation.

When it comes, as I expect it will some day--this general realization of
what only a few now understand--that the public library is worth trying to
influence and to exploit, our trouble will be that we shall be without any
machinery at all to receive it, to take care of it, to direct the good
into proper channels and to withstand the evil. We are occasionally
annoyed and disconcerted now by the infinitesimal amount of it that we
see; we wish people would mind their own business; we detest meddlers; we
should be able to do more work if it were not for the bores--and so on.
But what--what in heaven's name shall we do with the deluge when it comes?
With what dam shall we withstand it; through what sluices shall we lead
it; into what useful turbines shall we direct it? These things are worth
pondering.

For the present then, this independence of the library as a distributor
may be regarded as one of its chief economic advantages. Another is its
power as a leveler, and hence as an adjunct of democracy. Democracy is a
result, not a cause, of equality. It is natural in a community whose
members resemble each other in ability, modes of thought and mental
development, just as it is unthinkable where great natural differences
racial or otherwise, exist. If we wish to preserve democracy, therefore,
we must first maintain our community on something like a level. And we
must level it up, not down; for although a form of democracy may exist
temporarily among individuals equally ignorant or degraded, the advent of
a single person more advanced in the scale of ability, quickly transforms
it into absolutism. Similar inequalities may result in an aristocratic
regime. The reason wh