So far as my observation goes, the situation—­even the faintest glimmering of it—­is far from dawning on most of these bodies.  Most individuals, when the policy of the library suits them not, exhaust their efforts in an angry kick or an epistolary curse; they never even think of trying 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 why England, with its ancient aristocracy, on the whole, is so democratic, is that its commoners are constantly recruited by the younger sons of its nobility, so that the whole body politic is continually stirred