that is
inflammable.

The good that the libraries do is obvious and acknowledged. They
represent the accumulated experience of mankind brought to our service.
They are the custodians of whatever is most worthy of preservation in
our own life and literature. They are the natural depositories of what
we have of memorial and of records; the original entries of legislation
and of achievement. They must render history available; they must
adequately exhibit science; they may help to refine by the best examples
in each art, and in this they may also contribute to the industrial life
of the community by educating the artisan into an artist, his craft into
an art. And through record and description of processes and inventions
they may contribute to the foundations of great industries. They touch
the community as a whole as perhaps does no other single organized
agency for good. They offer to the shyest ignorance equality with the
most confident scholarship, and demand no formal preliminary which might
abash ignorance.

They have a profound duty--not generally appreciated--to help render
homogeneous the very heterogeneous elements of our population. Thirty
per cent. of it has come to us from an alien life and alien
institutions. One-third of the people in our six leading cities are of
foreign birth; seventy-one per cent. were either born abroad or born of
foreign parentage. In the assimilation of this foreign element no single
agency is perhaps so potent as our public libraries.

The public libraries deem themselves the allies of formal educational
processes; but also the direct educators of that part of the community
not subject to the formal processes. It is this latter responsibility
which has led them to attempt a broader service than the mere supply of
books. A book is not the only nor necessarily the most effective vehicle
for conveying knowledge. There are illustrations which more directly
convey an impression, and often as fully state a fact. And photographs
and process reproductions are now part of the equipment of a public
library almost as conventional as books. Within the past year 10,000
such have been added to the collections of the Boston Public Library;
not as works of art (they are for the most part cheap silver prints and
the Art Museum is but a hundred feet distant); nor merely as aids to the
study of the fine arts and the useful arts, but also as convenient
auxiliaries to the study of history, of literatur