ally as though it did not exist. It is our business
to assume that the mission of good books, books of knowledge, books of
thought, books of inspiration, books of right feeling, books of
wholesome imagination, can be pushed to every hearth, and to every child
and parent who sits by it. And it is our business to labor unsparingly
toward the making of that assumption good, without reckoning any
fraction of hopelessness in it.

That is the business to which we are appointed in this world. Let us be
careful that we do not misconceive it in one most important particular!
It is not the mission of _books_ that we are charged with, but the
mission of _good books_. And there lies a delicate, difficult, very
grave duty in that discrimination. To judge books with adequate
knowledge and sufficient hospitality of mind; to exercise a just choice
among them without offensive censorship; to defend his shelves against
the endless siege of vulgar literature, and yet not waste his strength
in the resistance--these are really the crucial demands made on every
librarian.

For the first condition of successful work is a good tool; and our tools
are not _books_, but _good books_. These given, then follow those
demands on us which we sometimes discuss as though they came first of
all: the demands, that is, for a perfected apparatus in the working
library, for a tireless energy in its motive forces, and for a large
intelligence in the directing of them.

Not many years ago, our missionary undertakings from the library seemed
to be bounded by its own walls. The improving, annotating, and
popularizing of catalogues; the printing and distributing of bulletins
and reference lists; the surrounding of readers and seekers in a library
with willing help and competent suggestion; these labors seemed, only a
few years ago, to include almost everything that the librarian most
zealous as a missionary could do. But see what doors have been opening
in the last few years, and what illimitable fields of labor now invite
him! Through one, the great army of the teachers in the common schools
is coming into co-operation with him. Through another, he steps into the
movement of university extension, and finds in every one of its servants
a true apostle of the library mission of good books. From a third, he
spreads his beneficient snares about a city in branches and delivery
stations; and by a fourth he sends "traveling libraries" to the ends of
his State.

The