er they will become men useful to the communities in which
they live and add substantial material to the sum of human knowledge, as
statesmen, inventors, naturalists, or astronomers. The danger is that,
for lack of proper guidance and restraint, they will dissipate their
mental energies and lose sight of all high aims by too much and too
vague reading. If the public library is to be in fact, what it is in
theory, an educating power second only to the church and the school, and
supplementing the work of both, there must be some method devised by
which such readers as these may be helped to choose the right books.
Without such aid, given continually and systematically, the library
fails in the principal end for which it was founded--the elevation and
instruction of the people. We might as well turn our children into a
school-house, fully furnished with books and apparatus, but with only a
janitor to see that no injury is done to them, and expect the children
to make a wise use of their opportunities, to take up and pursue the
proper studies without the aid of a master, as to give children the free
range of a great library and expect them undirected to make a wise use
of its advantages as a means of education. It is, therefore, in my
opinion, a most pernicious error to encourage young people, of the lower
classes especially, to come to a library, and to give them poor stories
in the mistaken belief that, the taste for reading being developed, they
will naturally and surely rise from these to better books. Such a belief
is contrary to all our experience of human nature. With careful guidance
and restraint a boy may be brought from the Dime novel to read Scott and
Macaulay. But without this restraint and guidance, where one will rise,
a hundred, a thousand rather, will remain at the level from which they
started, or more naturally sink to still lower depths.

The question is, Can anything be done to help the young who throng our
public libraries to read well and wisely? Shall these boys and girls,
with their unknown powers both for good and evil, be left to grope
helplessly amid these treasures of wisdom and knowledge which our
libraries contain, or shall the attempt at least be made to give them a
kindly and intelligent guidance? This work, of such incalculable
importance, I hasten to say, is already well done to a certain extent by
a few librarians in the country. But it is a work which requires time,
patience, tact, an ins