state.

or two prescribed texts, reads and reports in detail a minimum of eight or nine hundred pages in a choice shelf collection of library books, takes and submits notes, writes brief themes and prepares for weekly quizzes wherein the members of his class section helpfully interchange ideas and information. The postoffice is the medium for extension from the university to a vaster body of students everywhere throughout the The same materials-books, periodicals, newspapers, and official documents,—that the student of politics uses under the personal oversight of the university instructor, are scattered in vast abundance everywhere. The state is one great library. The largest single collection is paltry beside this magnificent and everincreasing supply of political literature that permeates every hamlet. Civic intelligence has thriven upon the mere haphazard and desultory reading of the people. Correspondence studies will put their scattered material into shape for them and systematize their use thereof." The library and the university may serve the citizen by giving unity and direction to his reading, helping him to hitherto hidden worth and meaning in the humblest literary material at his hand, by quickening his interest alike in the offices, institutions and activities that lie nearest to his daily life and in his world-wide relationship with his fellowmen. For the citizen on the farm, at the desk, or in the factory, they point the way out of vague realizations into distinct and definite command of his political self, offer refreshing change from the narrowing viewpoint of individual interest, to the broadening viewpoint of his town or state or country, and lead on to far international vistas of world-wide life and destiny.

Society has an interest in this beyond the rights of the individual. The greatest waste to society is not

that which comes from improvidence, but from undeveloped or unused opportunity. So it becomes the duty of every community to make its contribution to the world, whether it be in the realm of invention, scientific discovery, or literature. And how is this to be done if genius and talent are allowed to die unborn for lack of opportunity to grow? Wonderful as has been the progress of the world's knowledge during the last century of scientific research, who will venture to say that it constitutes more than a fraction of what might have been if all the genius that remained dormant and unproductive could have been utilized? From what we know of isolated instances where mere chance has saved to the world great forces that make for the progress of humanity, we can infer what might have been realized, under happier conditions. Every librarian of experience, every administrator of traveling libraries, will recall such instances. One boy comes upon the right book, and the current of his life is changed; another reads a volume, and in his brain germinates the seed that blossoms into a great invention; in a chance hour of reading, a third finds in a page, a phrase, a word, the inspiration whose expression sets aflame the world. A master pen has vividly described the process:2

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"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume. When hot from play he would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on; if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some 'George Eliot, "Middlemarch."

men.

freshness for him. In vain! unless, indeed, he first took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels-the volumes of an old encyclopedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down; but he opened the volume. which he took first from the shelf; somehow one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvæ were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely-adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had, of course, left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal. structure, had left his imagination quite unbiased, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour he felt the growth of an intellectual passion."

And in this wise the world gained a great physician.

All this may be said without disparagement to that phase of library usefulness which may be termed the recreative. There has been undue and unreasoning criticism of the library tendency to minister to the novel-reading habit. Many good people are inclined to decry the public library because not all its patrons confine their loans to books dealing with science, or with useful arts. In their judgment it is not the legitimate function of the public library to meet the public demand for fiction. These same good people would hardly urge that the freedom of the public parks should be limited to those who wish to make

botanical studies. The pure joy in growing things and fresh air and the song of uncaged birds, needs no knowledge of scientific terms in botany and ornithology. These privileges are promotive of the physical well-being of the people; correspondingly, healthy mental stimulus is to be found in "a sparkling and sprightly story which may be read in an hour and which will leave the reader with a good conscience and a sense of cheerfulness." Our own good friend, Mr. John Cotton Dana, has admirably epitomized the underlying philosophy:

"A good story has created many an oasis in many an otherwise arid life. Many-sidedness of interest makes for good morals, and millions of our fellows step through the pages of a story book into a broader world than their nature and their circumstances ever permit them to visit. If anything is to stay the narrowing and hardening process which specialization of learning, specialization of inquiry and of industry and swift accumulation of wealth are setting up among us, it is a return to romance, poetry, imagination, fancy, and the general culture we are now taught to despise. Of all these the novel is a part; rather, in the novel are all of these. But a race may surely find springing up in itself a fresh love of romance, in the high sense of that word, which can keep it active, hopeful, ardent, progressive. Perhaps the novel is to be, in the next few decades, part of the outward manifestation of a new birth of this love of breadth and happiness."

There is, then, no limitation to the scope of library extension save that enforced by meagerness of resource and physical ability to do. In the proper affiliation and correlation of all these forces which have been enumerated and of others suggested by them, will develop that process whereby the social betterment that today seems but a dream will be brought into reality. The form this combination will assume need give us no concern-whether its local physical expression shall be as in Boston a group of

buildings maintained as separate institutions; or as in Pittsburgh, a complete, related scheme of activities covered by one roof; as planned in Cleveland, a civic center with the public library giving it character and substance; or as in New York, where many institutions, remotely located but intimately associated, work toward a common end. Many roads may lead to a common center. Which one the wayfarer chooses is a matter of mere personal preference and of no importance, so that he wends his way steadily onwards towards the object of his attainment. In the evolution of these uplifting processes, the book shall stand as symbol, as the printed page shall serve as instrument.