One noticeable effect of the war in libraries has been to stimulate the marking of books, periodicals and newspapers by readers, especially in periodical rooms.  Readers with strong feelings cannot resist annotating articles or chapters that express opinions in which they cannot concur.  Pictures of generals or royalties are especially liable to defacement with opprobrious epithets.  This feeling extends even to bulletins.  Libraries receive strenuous protests against the display of portraits and other material relating to one of the contesting parties without similar material on the other side to offset it.

“Efforts to be strictly neutral have not always met with success, some readers apparently regarding neutrality as synonymous with suppression of everything favorable to the opposite side.  One library reports that the display of an English military portrait called forth an energetic protest because it was not balanced by a German one.”

Such manifestations as these are merely symptoms.  The impulse of the war toward community education is a tremendous one and it is not strange that it should find an outlet in all sorts of odd ways.  The German sympathizer who would not ordinarily think of objecting to the display of an English portrait, and in fact would probably not think of examining it closely enough to know whether it was English or Austrian, has now become alert.  His alertness makes him open to educative influences, but it may also show itself in such ways as that just noted.

Keeping the war out of the schools is of course a purely local phenomenon, to be deprecated where it occurs.  The library can do its part here also.

“G.  Stanley Hall believes that the problem of teaching the war is how to utilize in the very best way the wonderful opportunity to open, see and feel the innumerable and vital lessons involved.”  Commenting on this a children’s librarian says:  “The unparalleled opportunity offered to our country, and the new complex problems presented by these new conditions should make the children’s librarian pause and take heed.

“Can we do our part toward using the boy’s loyalty to his gang or his nine, his love of his country, his respect for our flag, his devotion to our heroes, in developing a sense of human brotherhood which alone can prevent or delay in the next generation another such catastrophe as the one we face to-day?”

Exclusion of the war from the schools is partly the outcome of the general attitude of most of our schoolmen, who object to the teaching of a subject as an incidental.  Arithmetic must be studied for itself alone.  To absorb it as a by-product of shop-work, as is done in Gary, is inadmissible.  But it is also a result of the fear that teaching the war at all would necessarily mean a partisan teaching of it—­a conclusion which perhaps we cannot condemn when we remember the partisan instruction in various other subjects for which our schools are responsible.