t distinguished American librarians, who has been an administrator in
a large educational field outside of the library, expressed his view of
the supreme importance of the library in a scheme of popular education
by saying that if he had to choose between the public school and the
public library--if he could have only one--(though the alternative is
one that never will or can be presented), he would keep the library and
let the school go. For, he argued, every child would learn to read
somehow; and, with a free library that actively sought him, he would be
better off than if he had a school to teach him to read, but no books to
read after he had learned. But however divergent might be opinions
regarding this impossible alternative, there is no doubt that the public
library, with enlarged functions and activities, has at least equal
potentialities with the school. Whether the formal instruction of the
school or the broader education of the library is of greater value,
depends on what is the chief aim. If it is merely to make breadwinners,
the school may be the more useful, though in this, too, the library is
an efficient coadjutor; but if our purpose is to make men and women,
citizens of a progressive nation, active members of an aspiring society,
the library may fairly claim at least equal rank with the school. For
the school wields its direct influence over the average child but a few
years; the library is an active influence through life.

Again, more than ninety-five children out of every hundred leave school
before they are sufficiently mature to comprehend those studies which
open their eyes to the universe, which bear upon their relations to
their fellow-men, upon their duties as citizens of a state, as members
of organized society. These are the studies that deal with the most
important problems that mankind has to solve. They cannot be taught to
children; they cannot be taught--dogmatically--at all. They involve the
consideration of burning questions, subjects of bitter controversy--the
world-old battle between conservatism and innovation which, as Emerson
says, "is the subject of civil history." They cannot be taught by any
teacher, they cannot be taught by any text-book or by any one book.
Their adequate consideration calls for the reading of many books--books
of the present and the future as well as the past. The electrician who
allows himself to be guided by the treatises of twenty years ago would
have no sta