e of no importance in comparison with the benefits which
education confers upon the immense majority of the community and with
the fact that without free schools and libraries a large part of the
people will not be sufficiently educated to be useful citizens.

With the regard to the third count, the public library, again, may be
considered together with the public school. While it is difficult to
trace to either specific instances of material or moral improvement, it
is certain that the general diffusion of intelligence which both
certainly effect does result beneficially in these directions.
Communities with flourishing free schools and libraries are usually more
prosperous and better than those without such facilities, and, while
there is doubtless room here for a confusion of cause and effect, it is
probable that there is both action and reaction. Prosperity calls for
increased facilities for education and these in turn tend to make the
community more prosperous.

That the majority of books withdrawn from public libraries are works of
fiction cannot be denied. Many librarians are wont to deplore this fact,
and most libraries endeavor in one way or another to decrease the
percentage of fiction in their circulation.

The proportion of recreative reading in a public library is necessarily
large. In like manner, the greater proportion of those who visit a
zoological or botanical garden do so for amusement. Yet the information
that they secure in so doing is none the less valuable and both are
certainly educational institutions. So if in the public library a large
number of its users get their history, their travel and their biography
through the medium of recreative readings we should not complain. Were
it otherwise these readers would probably lack altogether the
information that they now certainly acquire.

Taking up the final count in the indictment, it is doubtless true that
sentimental and emotional considerations have had much to do with
library development. They have furnished the initial motive power, as
they have for free schools, for the origin and progress of democratic
government, and for most of the advances of civilization. They often
precede deliberate, conscious reasoning and judgment, yet they are often
themselves the result of an unconscious reasoning process producing
action of the will in advance of deliberate judgment. Sometimes they are
pure reflexes, like winking when the eye is threatened by a