s of too much light reading, and the absence
of proper appreciation of the best things--there are evoked resources to
meet these dangers.

Outside the library there come up the "association to promote study at
home," and the vast Chautauqua "reading circles"--all these being
essentially based on the free library system, and implying it for their
full development. Inside the library there grow up such methods as those
of Mr. S.S. Green, City Librarian of Worcester, Massachusetts, whose
ways of making such an institution useful to all sorts and conditions of
the people may take rank with Rowland Hill's improvements in postal
service, as to their results on democratic civilization. He has
succeeded in linking the library and the public schools so closely that
he and the teachers acting in concurrence, indirectly control the
reading of the whole generation that is growing up in that city. The
details must be sought in his reports--as, for instance, one from the
Library Journal of March, 1887, which is printed as a leaflet; but the
essential thing in managing libraries, as in managing schools, is to
have faith in the community in which one lives, and to believe that
people do, as the Scripture has it, "covet earnestly the best gifts," if
you will only show them how those best gifts are to be obtained. Put
into school and library methods one-half the organizing ability brought
to bear on railways and telegraphs, and we shall stand astonished at the
results within our reach. Those already attained, if fairly looked at,
are sufficient to encourage any one. The writer has at two different
times and in two different States been a director in these institutions.
Whenever he needed a little stimulus toward doing his duty it was his
custom to go and look over the rack containing the books lately brought
back by readers. With all necessary deduction for the love of fiction--a
love shared in these days by the wisest and best--the proportion of
sensible and useful reading was always such as to vindicate the immense
value of the free public libraries.

TWO FUNDAMENTALS

Mary Salome Cutler, now Mrs. Milton Fairchild, is the first
librarian to be quoted in this symposium. A sketch of her
appears in Vol. II. of this series. In the paragraphs quoted
below which form part of a paper read by Miss Cutler, then
vice-director of the New York State Library School, before
the Pennsylvania Library Club and printed i