ave a personal acquaintance
with the city officers, the party bosses, the labor leaders, members of
the board of trade, manufacturers, leading women in society, with the
clergy, with the school superintendent and the teachers, with those who
shape the charitable organizations, with reporters, policemen, and
reformers.

To what end? Broadly that he may catch the spirit of the civic life and
relate the library to the whole as the organs to the body. Specifically,
that he may reach the entire population through the natural leaders,
that he may select books, establish branches, open up new avenues of
communication between the library and the people.

The church may be aristocratic, industry, trade, and politics a war,
the public school like the drinking-fountain, though planned for the
many scorned by the few. I believe it is possible for a man with a broad
and sympathetic knowledge of our age and an intimate knowledge of his
own city, to make of the public library the one common meeting-place,
the real focus of democratic ideas. The church and the school will reach
this in the future, the library may achieve it to-day.

There is a third difficulty, which is a very real and palpable one. The
librarian himself may have a fairly high ideal of the library which is
shared by perhaps one or two assistants. The bulk of the work in a
library with a large circulation is done by young persons of less
opportunity and training. Each has a distinct part of the work to do
with little idea of its relation to the whole. Unfortunately the
loan-desk, registration-desk, and reading-room are usually manned in
this way. I have often stood amazed at the delivery-desk of librarians
whose names represent all that is best in the library profession. I
would not be understood as depreciating the work of the lower assistants
in our libraries. I know well that this service, as a whole, represents
an amount of faithfulness and devotion which it ill becomes me to
undervalue. The responsibility lies with the head of the library and the
failure comes from lack of organization. The appointing power should be
practically in his hands. The man whom we have described above does not
need to seek this power. It comes to him. It is surely possible to
secure for the library service young men and women, boys and girls, of
fair intelligence, quick wits, responsive minds, and human sympathies.
The making of these units into an organism is the severest test of a
l