These things are all legitimate and it is better that they should take place in a library or a school building than in a saloon or even in a grocery store.  The influence of environment is gently pervasive.  I may be wrong, but I cannot help thinking that it is easier to be a gentleman in a library, whether in social meeting or in political debate, than it is in some other places.  In one of our branches there meets a club of men who would be termed anarchists by some people.  The branch librarian assures me that the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder since they have met in the library.  It is getting to be literary, academic, philosophic.  Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudicious repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs and dynamite.

In this catholicity I cannot help thinking that the library as an educational institution is a step ahead of the school.  Most teachers would resent the imputation of partisanship on the part of the school, and yet it is surely partisan—­in some ways rightly and inevitably so.  One cannot well explain both sides of any question to a child of six and leave its decision to his judgment.  This is obvious; and yet I cannot help thinking that there is one-sided teaching of children who are at least old enough to know that there is another side, and that the one-sided teaching of two-sided subjects might be postponed in some cases until two-sided information would be possible and proper.  Where a child is taught one side and finds out later that there is another, his resentment is apt to be bitter; it spoils the educational effect of much that he was taught and injures the influence of the institution that taught him.  My resentment is still strong against the teaching that hid from me the southern viewpoint concerning slavery and secession, the Catholic viewpoint of what we Protestants call the Reformation—­dozens of things omitted from textbooks on dozens of subjects because they did not happen to meet the approval of the textbook compiler.  I am no less an opponent of slavery—­I am no less a Protestant—­because I know the other side, but I think I am a better man for knowing it, and I think it a thousand pities that there are thousands of our fellow citizens, on all sides of all possible lines, from whom our educative processes have hid even the fact that there is another side.  This question, as I have said, does not affect the library, and fortunately need not affect it.  And as we are necessarily two-sided in our book material so we can open our doors to free social or neighborhood use without bothering our heads about whether the users are Catholics, Protestants, or Jews; Democrats, Republicans, or Socialists; Christian Scientists or suffragists.  The library hands our suffrage and anti-suffrage literature to its users with the same smile, and if it hands the anti-suffrage books to the suffragist, and vice versa, both sides are certainly the better for it.