Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
Science
Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
American Library Association; Library science -- Congresses
Let me without any offense or bad taste be personal and speak of one
of my ancestors. He has been dead a long time. I didn't know him. But
not infrequently I can feel the thrill and the efforts at domination
of his convictions and his habits. I remember a dog biting me. I could
have strangled the creature with my hands. I did not learn that in
school, but I had the instinct in me from that old ancestor. I can
think of him in a cave, living a bare coarse life. But he conserved the
chance for the babies; and the lion and the wolf and the bear could not
stand against the club and the fire which he used for the protection
of his wife and children. Coarse! Of course he was. A thing of paws
and claws and jaws! But he conserved his concepts of duty, his ideals
of protection for the young and the weak. His concepts and the labors
and struggles they involved by and by refined his body. Then, ages
afterwards, 20,000 or 30,000 years afterwards, we had Lord Lister. Two
hundred and fifty thousand women saved annually through the service
of his refined brain and his trained hands, and his large concepts of
duty. And we had Florence Nightingale; and you had Abraham Lincoln.
And we all have everybody and anybody that conserves concepts of joy
and glory through duty discharged by constructive, contributing labor,
social service and abiding good will. In these and others innumerable
we have a heritage, not made with hands.
Time fails me even to name all our other heritages which are not in
material resources. There are customs, institutions, laws, manners,
ideas, traditions, standards, ideals, art, songs, language and books.
Books are more than material things. They are material humanized into
food for the mind and spirit as soil and air may be glorified into
apples and flowers for the senses. Sometimes produced with immense
pains, they bring infinite joys. The Kingdom hath come to us for such a
time as this when a new day dawns for happiness and well-being on earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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