doings of some of our historical societies. Some of the historical societies are largely concerned with gathering together a lot of very sombre volumes which would throw the most cheerful library into the deepest gloom, and the outside is light itself in comparison with the interior of those volumes. Undoubtedly, the ladies will help to popularize history. As I said, you can make anything attractive. Sydney Smith said, writing of the low countries, that some time in the eighteenth century it became the custom, whenever there was an execution, to have very elaborate ceremonies. They would have processions and they would have singing and flowers, and just before the final act the clergyman would deliver a long address to the man who was the central figure of the event; and Sydney Smith said that this so appealed to the people that in order to enjoy these inestimable advantages they took to committing murder, and it became necessary for the government to make hanging dull, as well as deadly, before it ceased to be an object of popular ambition. Of course, your especial field will be the history of Lynn, of the people of this city and of the town that preceded it. It is true that there have been lost many valuable papers and manuscripts and things that would be of great worth to the historian, which can never be recovered; but sometimes we do find in out-of-the-way places very old historical relics, and some you will doubtless find in Lynn. This building will be the storehouse in which they will be preserved. You can especially preserve the records of the doings of to-day, and everything of historical importance can be collected here, so that the future historian will have no difficulty in writing the history of the Lynn of to-day. I have been very much interested in listening to the President's review of the history of Lynn and her people. You have had a history that is quite typical of many New England towns. Lynn is not exactly sea-girt like Ithaca, but it is next the ocean. But it did not seem to get its first important prosperity from the sea. Industry came first and commerce came lagging afterward. Your neighboring town of Salem made quite an imposing figure in history on account of her commerce; she had ships on every sea and acquired great wealth. The Lynn people did their banking in Salem, and when it was first proposed to found a bank in Lynn, they still felt dependent upon Salem and the bank was not started. Lynn's prosperity did not come from commerce like that of Salem. But when Lynn forged to the front, she distanced many towns among her neighbors that had many years the start of her and had established themselves as important centres. The shoe industry was the beginning of Lynn's prosperity and the relation between the traditional shoe industry and intelligence is very close. Longfellow, you will remember, in his beautiful poem on Nuremberg, referred thus to a celebrated shoemaker; "Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, laureate of the gentle craft Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed. Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard, But thy painter, Albrecht Durer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler-bard." You have produced poets; you have produced writers. I do not know whether that has resulted especially from the shoe manufacturing, but I imagine that the modern method of manufacturing shoes, where the worker is chased by fast-flying machinery, may not be conducive to poetry. I understand that in making shoes in a town like Lynn there is not that response to the bell, there is not the servitude to hours, that there is in other lines of industry. We have had many men prominent in the history of the United States who made shoes. Roger Sherman, an ancestor of Senator Hoar, came from Connecticut and was a great figure in the Revolution, and I remember that Senator Hoar said that his favorite gesture was something like that made by the shoemaker when drawing out the thread. Sherman was a shoemaker. Henry Wilson, Vice President of the United States, was also a shoemaker. This is not intended to induce you all to turn your attention to shoemaking, but simply to dwell in a suitable way on the important item in Lynn's industry. The object of this society, as I said, is to act as what Mr. Charles Francis Adams calls a "catch-basin" and receive the different historical material that may be available in this community. History is a very broad subject. It includes not merely the doings of men, but it includes all the phenomena of the natural world. In writing history the first process is to collect the raw material, to get the facts, and then by means of literary art to give those facts suitable expression. We hear a great deal about the historical imagination. I do not know exactly what historical imagination is. The object of history is exact narration, but the record of unclothed facts and of verified statistics in history would be as dry as a Patent Office report. But there is ample room for the literary art, even in recording facts. If a great battle is described, it is within the power of the man who has the requisite touch and the requisite comprehension to call that event out of the past; it is within the power of that man to record the battle so that the one who reads can see it himself, to invest it with the dramatic interest of the deed, so that it is fought over again under the eye of the reader. It is not necessary for the historian to draw upon his imagination. The material is there and the historian may make it vital. But he must not play favorites. He must display absolute impartiality between the men whose deeds he records. He must give the facts as they are, and if he can give them with the vividness and the dramatic interest to make them live again, he will be an ideal historian. One of the functions of an historical society, which it usually exercises, is to have a library. I doubt if that is to be one of the functions of this society, except, perhaps, to have what particularly relates to the history of Lynn. I do not know but after all we have as many and as great libraries in the world as we need. I remember that Lord Rosebery, in speaking at the dedication of a library, said that he did not propose to repeat any of the twenty-two thousand platitudes uttered at the dedication of the twentytwo hundred libraries given by Mr. Carnegie; and he confessed that he had a feeling of depression in the presence of a great collection of books,-it seemed to him like a cemetery of books. If you go into the British Museum, you will find millions upon millions of volumes, and you will see miles and miles of shelves from which the books have not been taken since they were first placed there, slumbering under the accumulated dust of years. It is hopeless for a man who wants to survey the achievements of men as reported in books to think of looking at even an insignificant fraction of the books contained in some of these great libraries. The making of books has become a great industry that almost ranks in the bulk of its product with the lumber industry. I remember a New York newspaper a few years ago published a great Sunday edition, and it boasted in that edition that the paper necessary to make it required the destruction of forty acres of spruce trees. I have thought in looking at some of these Sunday |