286 CHARLES AMMI CUTLER 



than entertainment or novelty; go into the children's room, 

 mark their satisfaction as they cluster round the shelves and 

 discuss their favorite books, or sit absorbed, the older ones in 

 magazines, the younger in picture books; see their friend the 

 attendant helping them, or rather showing them how to help 

 themselves, now and then putting in a word about their choice 

 of books, but obtruding nothing; in a class room see a school 

 teacher showing her scholars the books that illustrate their 

 lessons ; go into the exhibition room and see the lines of photo- 

 graphs illustrating some great painter, or the architecture and 

 art galleries of some famous city, the dwellings and peasantry 

 of some unknown country, the peaks and glaciers of a great 

 range of mountains; hear in one room a man reading to the 

 blind, in another a musician trying music, in a third see a 

 photographer reproducing manuscript documents; here a 

 clerk is dispatching books borrowed by a distant library for 

 one of its clients, there another is choosing books which are 

 sent once or twice a week to a delivery in an outlying village ; 

 an intelligent assistant will go with them and, knowing all the 

 borrowers, will recommend to each the book which will suit 

 him best, gently leading him to better reading — a sort of 

 pastoral care that it is not easy to give in the rush of the crowd- 

 ed central delivery room ; note that this goes on ten or twelve 

 hours every day in the year; that it is free to all; that if former- 

 ly libraries were for the learned, now it is certainly to the ig- 

 norant that the gospel of learning is given; and then say 

 whether the public library is failing in its duty to the com- 

 munity. 



From time to time some one is alarmed at the extension of 

 library activity and cries '^panem et circenses." But the cir- 

 censes, which being interpreted is novels, are so inextricably 

 bound up with the educational work of the library, being the 

 inducement to many to come and be taught, and they arc as 

 now written so largely educational themselves, that their sup- 

 ply will stand or fall with the libraries. For the panem, the 

 solid work of the library, whose paying for out of the public 

 pocket seems to certain theorists of dangerous tendency, only 

 justified on socialistic grounds, the extremest individualist 

 admits the necessity of combining for the public defense, and it 



