bor" tells of his school experience. A passage from it is worth quoting:

"What a desert of knowledge it was back there. Our placid tolerance of the profs included the books they gave us. The history prof gave us ten books of collateral reading. Each book, if we could pledge our honor as gentlemen that we had read it, counted us five in examination. On the night before the examination I happened to enter the room of one of our football giants, and found him surrounded by five freshmen, all of whom were reading aloud. One was reading a book on Russia, another the life of Frederick the Great, a third was patiently droning forth Napoleon's war on Europe, while over on the window-seat the other two were racing through volumes one and two of Carlyle's French Revolution. The room was a perfect babel of sound. But the big man sat and smoked his pipe, his honor safe and the morrow secure. In later years, whatever might happen across the sea would find this fellow fully prepared, a wise, intelligent judge of the world, with a college education."

Into the atmosphere of the school must be introduced some element that will bring to the growing boys and girls a love of reading and a genuine desire for absorbing those vital forces of life which literature images. If we believe that the ultimate aim of education is that of the ultimate aim of life, there must be that attenion to the individual need which in the end makes for the uplifting of all. To that end the means must be wrought. If the school must deal perforce with groups rather than with units, the methods of the library adapt themselves to the converse plan of individual treatment. If the school narrows the pathway by compulsion, the library gives the joy of freedom unrestricted. Therein lies its potency, and therein does it make appeal not to the few elect, but to the many. And herein lies its greater service.

"Progress is

The law of life, man is not man as yet,

Nor shall I deem his object served, his end

Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,

Equal in full-blown powers-then, not till then,

I say, begins man's general infancy."

Wherefore this emphasis upon the school side of library work? Not, of course, at the expense of the service which is furnished to young and old in relief from the drab dullness of life, but parallel with it, must the library labor. For here lies its mission of permanent influences, and at no time has there been greater need.

Suddenly, the seemingly well-fortified pillars of civilization have crumbled. Confused, dismayed, disheartened, society witnesses rapid disintegration of foundations which centuries of patient endeavor have constructed. Science, thought to be the instrument of man's weal, has become the subtle and baleful agent of destruction. The racial hyphen, long looked upon as the symbol of cohesion, has become the sign of separation. The Christian nations of the earth are at each other's throats with a ferocity and malignity unparalleled. Under a flag which shelters ninety millions of individuals whose forebears peopled every land upon the habitable globe, and who seek to merge the best of their racial qualities in a common life that shall typify a new standard of civilization, must be wrought that miracle of human evolution which shall establish concord and good will between members of alien races dwelling together. To effect this it must be demonstrated that "assimilation is a matter of understanding and ideas, and not merely of manners and customs."

And so, despite the gloomy murk that now envelops the world, we must realize the need of beginning the reconstruction of our demolished ideals.

This is the day of readjustments. We must begin again, but we must begin at the point of beginning, with the plastic mind of youth. Happily, if not now, generations hence, the world may realize the poet's prophecy, and the hope it holds:

"For no new sense puts forth in us but we
Enter our fellow's lives thereby the more.

And three great spirits with the spirit of man
Go forth to do his bidding. One is free,
And one is shackled, and the third, unbound,
Halts yet a little with a broken chain
Of antique workmanship, not wholly loosed,
That dangles and impedes his forthright way.
Unfettered, swift, hawk-eyed, implacable,
The wonder-worker, Science, with his wand,
Subdues an alien world to man's desires.
And Art with wide imaginative wings
Stands by, alert for flight, to bear his lord,
Into the strange heart of that alien world
Till he shall live in it as in himself
And know its longing as he knows his own.
Behind a little, where the shadows fall,
Lingers Religion with deep-brooding eyes,
Serene, impenetrable, transpicuous

As the all-clear and all-mysterious sky,

Biding her time to fuse into one act

Those other twain, man's right hand and his left.

For all the bonds shall be broken and rent in sunder,

And the soul of man go free

Forth with those three

Into the lands of wonder;

Like some undaunted youth,

Afield in quest of truth,

Rejoicing in the road he journeys on

As much as in the hope of journey done.

And the road runs east, and the road runs west,

That his vagrant feet explore;

And he knows no haste and he knows no rest,

And every mile has a stranger zest

Then the miles he trod before;

And his heart leaps high in the nascent year

When he sees the purple buds appear:

For he knows, though the great black frost may blight The hope of May in a single night,

That the spring, though it shrink back under the bark, But bides its time somewhere in the dark

Though it come not now to its blossoming,

By the thrill in his heart he knows the spring;

And the greater to-morrow is on its way ́ ́.

It shall keep with its roses yet in June;

And the promise it makes perchance too soon,
For the ages fret not over a day,

THE WORLD OF PRINT AND THE WORLD'S

· WORK1
I

URNING for a text to Victor Hugo's stirring epic of Paris, these words may be found in the section for May, and in the third chapter thereof:

"A Library implies an act of faith

Which generations still in darkness hid

Sign in their night, in witness of the dawn."

When Johann Gutenberg in his secret workshop poured the molten metal into the rough matrices he had cut for separate types, the instrument for the spread of democracy was created. When early Cavaliers and Puritans planted the crude beginnings of free public schools, the forces of democracy were multiplied. When half a century ago the first meager beginnings of the public library movement were evolved, democracy was for all time assured. Thus have three great stages, separated each by a span of two hundred years from that preceding, marked that world development whose ultimate meaning is not equality of station or possession, but equality of opportunity.

Not without stress and strife have these yet fragmentary results been achieved. Not without travail

'President's address at Kaaterskill Conference, American Library Association, June, 1913.