of the Churches of Christ in America—­an ambitious name, not yet justified by the facts—­the proposed amalgamation of several of the most powerful Protestant bodies in Canada, and the accomplished fact of the University of Toronto—­an institution whose constituent colleges are controlled by different religious denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church.  I may also mention the present organization of the New York Public Library, many of whose branch libraries were contributions from religious denominations, including the Jews, the Catholics and the Episcopalians.  All these now work together harmoniously.  I know of nothing of this kind on any other continent, and I think we shall be justified in crediting it to the present American tendency to eclecticism.

Turn for a moment to philosophy.  What is the philosophical system most widely known at present as American?  Doubtless the pragmatism of William James.  No one ever agreed with anyone else in a statement regarding philosophy, and I do not expect you to agree with me in this; but pragmatism seems to me essentially an eclectic system.  It is based on the character of results.  Is something true or false?  I will tell you when I find out whether it works practically or not.  Is something right or wrong?  I rely on the same test.  Now it seems to me that this is the scheme of the peasant in later Rome, who was perfectly willing to appeal to Roman Juno or Egyptian Isis or Phoenician Moloch, so long as he got what he wanted.  If a little bit of Schopenhauer works, and some of Fichte; a piece of Christianity and a part of Vedantism, it is all grist to the mill of pragmatism.  Any of it that works must of necessity be right and true.  I am not criticizing this, or trying to controvert it; I am merely asserting that it leads to eclecticism; and this, I believe, explains its vogue in the United States.

It would be impossible to give, in the compass of a brief address, a list of all the domains in which this eclecticism—­this tendency to select, combine and blend—­has cropped out among us Americans of today.  I have reserved for the last that in which we are particularly interested—­the Public Library, in which we may see it exemplified in an eminent degree.  The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any other part of the world.  Foreign librarians and foreign library users look at us askance.  They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our extravagance.  They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are compelled to foot the bills for what we do.  But the taxpayers do not seem to mind.  They frequently complain, but not about what we are doing.  What bothers them is that we do not try to do more.  When we began timidly to add branch libraries to our system they asked us why we did not build and equip them