liographic aids, which are sent out all over the United States to other libraries and individual researchers, and sometimes information from books not to be sent away. In addition to this is the growing and important function of loans. Books on all sorts of remote and technical subjects, not available in the other libraries, are sent out from this library all over the nation, and this system of a national circulating library, of books not likely to be in use in Washington, is becoming one of the most interesting and valuable features of the work. Inquiries are answered freely out of its own books or directions are given where to find the information, if it can not be found here. The library of the Surgeon-General's office also sends its books out to members of the medical profession of the United States, and has published a catalogue covering practically the entire field of the medical sciences, making a duplication unnecessary. The national librarian has said this catalogue has conferred a general benefit not equaled by any bibliographic work within any other department of literature and is the most eminent bibliographic work yet accomplished by any government. The cost of its publication has already exceeded $250,000.

The extension of the loan and inquiry system and bibliographic information bureau, as it were, is duplicated in no other place in the world.

The work of the ninety cataloguers of the library is peculiarly interesting in that, on a self-supporting basis, it is offering help in the printed cards, to seven hundred different other libraries in the United States. It costs from twentyfive to fifty cents a volume for an expert cataloguer's service, and from fifteen to thirty-five cents for each card in a catalogue. The library has instituted a system by which new books are catalogued and the cards printed and cards furnished to such libraries as are putting the books in question on their shelves. These cards are furnished as reprints to these

libraries for two cents for the first copy and one-half cent for each other сору, or five copies for five cents for all necessary entries, which would have cost them from twenty-five to fifty cents. The receipts of the national library from this source last year were about $17,000, enough to pay the expenses of the whole work, and something like $100,000 were saved to those libraries which have availed themselves of this national library service. In this highly differentiated organism, after the vast materials are acquired and catalogued, they are classified in groups for the convenience of readers; documents, law manuscripts, prints, periodicals, music and maps. Outside this there is a service of scientists to scientists and of specialists to specialists.

As the fountain-head of national scholarship and research, it is the representative library of America. Its treasures of Americana are not complete but rich and it seeks constantly to render it complete in all that relates to discovery, settlement, history, biography, topography, geography, national history, etc., etc., on the continent.

Another example is the map division, which contains 70,000 maps, including 10,000 insurance maps of 60,000 sheets, giving every structure, with height and character of each, where fire-risks have been placed. This constitutes a history of the structural development of most of the towns of the country, and have not been saved by the publisher or insurance companies but have been saved by this library.

The librarian told the writer of this paper of an incident, two days before this writing, of a New York lawyer who had looked everywhere for certain maps of real estate in New York state, and came to Washington "day before yesterday." He found seven maps upon which the issues of a great case depended. One of Mr. Putnam's assistants accompanied the lawyer to New York with the maps and doubtless has them in court "this morning."

pounds, and then ten shillings, and thirteen or fifteen years after he charges it to profit and loss with the line "I suppose she never meant to pay it."

If a visitor from Mars were to reconstruct George Washington from his own extant manuscript, without reference to

G

another source of information, he would give us a figure without much of a halo on his brow, but perhaps it would not be more like the George Washington who was.

Berkeley, Cal.

FRANK VROOMAN.

REAT human questions are slow in formation. Events, time, conditions, environment, weld them together as words form sentences. When they reach the point of utterance, they have become truths. It is not possible to unsay them once they have been born into life and expressed in speech.

The labor problem is a great human question. Stripped of its unions, disturbing influences, arbitrary domination, ill-advised strikes and crimes, which have attached themselves to it really as barnacles, but acting as fetters, the labor problem stands before us, a Man, and puts to us the simple question:

66

"Is not the value of human liberty as great as the value of property?"

To this question there can be but one answer: Yes.

Yet, in point of fact, property and human life in the eye of the law are in many cases better protected than the essential rights of man, for whose benefit property and life have been thus protected.

One of our journals lately offered the following definition:

"A fact is a dead thing; Truth is a live thing. The fact must be warmed and vitalized in a human soul before it becomes a truth."

This is a wholesome and timely explanation of the difference between two words often misapplied the one for the other, or oftener misused so as to imply that they are interchangeable.

It is a fact that the strong arm of the law protects property. It is equally a fact that the same strong arm falls with authority upon any man who by physical violence and certain other proscribed acts disturbs the public peace.

Yet these two facts may not necessarily have arrived at the dignity of truths.

In our civilization fact often precedes truth.

Long ago public opinion pronounced that property and life must be protected and public peace preserved. It now remains for public opinion to rouse itself to further utterance and pronounce that there are other forces which disturb the peace as banefully and inevitably as physical violence and brute force.

What has been a fact should now warm into a truth. The administration of law should include in its punishment all breaches of public peace, of whatever nature.

At this day to discriminate and count the public peace disturbed only by the offender who resorts to brute force, is to hark back to ages when men seized whatever they could take by the strong arm, and so held it.

The human spirit has not changed. Theoretically, man has evolved away from the land baron; but practically it is only a change of base. The land baron has been succeeded by the commercial baron. The power of possession and property still rules, and right and

wrong are yet flexible standards, according to interpretation and the application of power.

Among facts unfortunately attaching themselves to the labor question, there stands forth prominently the one that labor, more than any other class of interests, is continually disturbing the sotermed public peace. Last year, or year before last, the coal miners in Pennsylvania stirred up the country. This year the mine workers of Colorado are roused to the point of desperate resistance against certain conditions connected with their employment. The only answer to the Why of this situation is this:

So long as the law provides no court for effective settlement of these troubles, the only weapon labor has for the defence of its interests, is refusal to work except upon agreed conditions.

Hence arises all the difficulty of the labor question and here it will remain until we offer labor some efficient substitute to which it can trust for its defence. As it now is, once the laborer refuses work on the employer's terms, he sees other men slipping into his place, thus rendering his one weapon powerless. What wonder then that, confronted by such defeat and with hunger threatening their helpless families, some in the ranks lose self-control and resort to acts of violence?

The fact can not be gainsaid that the letter of the law, as interpreted in recent strikes, has actually ranged all the forces of law and order on the side of employers as against strikers. Yet it cannot be admitted by any course of reasoning, that the spirit of the law was intended to lend state aid to one party in a controversy, as against another, without trial and before judgment.

It matters not what violence and bloodshed the state aims to prevent by intervention, or by protecting non-union men in the right to labor, this greater fact overshadows all: that by such protection employers are given not only moral support in conducting their business in their

own way and for their private profit, but the state actually by such protection becomes an ally of employers while the strife or controversy continues.

Let employers be forced to manage their business during strikes without the aid of the officers of the law, and the country would not so often be disturbed by strikes. It is the menace to life, and not the protection of it, which makes the National Guard useful to employers. They keep the strikers at bay.

Human equality does not agree with any such one-sided aid being rendered one belligerent, since the other is equally a citizen, and should be favored with all the rules of neutrality-at least in a republic. I neither commend anarchy nor condone the violence resorted to by desperate strikers. Neither do I pretend to deny that the arbitrary dictation of unions has in many cases been a blundering abuse of power and an unbearable menace to the freedom of employers.

I do not enter into this phase of the question. I simply wish to suggest that the labor question has advanced to a point where it demands that facts give place to truth-truth in the administration of justice, so that inordinate desire for wealth or power and its attendant evils, greed, fraud, oppression, shall be equally dealt with as disturbers of the peace and instigators to crime—as much to be feared as physical violence and other results of untamed human passion.

Without prejudice, let us calmly ask ourselves: "Is the principle right that the National Guard should be at the call of employers to uphold their dictum against another class of citizens who may have an equal or better right to aid and support in their contention?"

Has not the government alone the right to deal impartially with both sides in such a controversy? And facing the ever-recurring attitude ever-recurring attitude of employers against strikers, can we honestly say that the sole reason of dragging the National Guard into the controversy is not based upon the one fact of menace?

In our attitude toward labor, in our fear of strikes and their accompanying loss and violence, we seem quite to lose sight of the fact that in a republic such as ours, past conditions for the workman must yield place to present ones.

We invite and receive upon our shores, weekly, thousands of immigrants from the monarchies of the old world. They leave the monarchy and come here for what? For work, yes-but above all, for more pay. At once they get more pay. Later, Freedom is dinned into their ears and finally the vote is placed in their hands and they are told they are men and citizens. We glory in the freedom and hope America offers to the world; and yet when the question is raised as between master and man, some old instinct of domination rises and we expect the worker to yield a docile submission. At once we forget that we are in a republic, and refuse to consider that we are responsible for conditions, in that we have fed our workmen on meat and roused in them the spirit of independence. It is idle in this day and country to reason that workingmen should be satisfied, and that the world used to roll round more smoothly when master alone, and not man, dictated terms of labor. Master has changed, as well as man, in the passing years. Why expect labor to abide under past conditions while the rest of the world moves on?

If a money crisis arrives because circulation is clogged by money stored, cornered, or otherwise withheld from public use, the owners seeing fit to keep it idle, we do not call out the National Guard to menace or the police to arrest the owners of such funds, on the ground that they are disturbing the public peace, causing bankruptcy and inducing suicides.

Yet is it not a fact that a money-panic is a disturber of public peace in each of these ways?

I fear that we are prejudiced in our fair judgment by our point-of-view. We have looked so long upon possession as nine-tenths of the law that we have sur

rendered the other tenth, or lost sight of it. If capital does not come out and invest, we can't force it. Yet we reason against labor withheld as if it were a public servant which should continue on in the steady duty of work, whether it pays the laborer or not.

In general the public thinks little of the laborer. It calmly accepts the results of labor; it uses, enjoys and sometimes absorbs these results as a sort of natural right quite as God-given as sun and air. Therefore, when labor stops, when work is thrown aside, when the human worker questions, and pauses until his questions are answered, the public is angry and even fancies its rights invaded.

Equally false is the pretence advanced by many that they are against strikes because the labor union is wrong on principle. How?

If organization is right for one class of interests, it should be right for all. It can not be just to permit some people to organize for some purposes of fair profit or interest, and then refuse the same privilege to others. Surely the laborer has the highest right to set a price upon his labor and to have a voice as to the conditions surrounding his work.

The surest weapon labor has for its claim is refusal to work except upon agreed conditions. If it kept right on working, its demands would seldom, if ever, be agreed to. Certainly in no other instance of dispute would we expect that one party or side continue to aid and serve the other, just as if no question was in dispute, no concession demanded.

Labor must have the right to give or withold its service, or labor ceases to be recognized as the work of citizens and becomes the toil of serfs.

Admitting union in other interests, we must allow it to labor. To fight labor unions in the present is to fight windmills. The most we can hope to do is to control them.

No element of power in the world is without its attendant danger. Because