taneous
expression of the neighborhood's own demand, whether it is from
children, or women, or men. A chain of suffrage groups was successful,
if numbers were an indication, in one neighborhood and a failure in
another--from the same cause. In a neighborhood of illiterate foreign
women with large families, one suffragist lecturer on the common law of
England was greeted by an audience consisting of one deaf old lady and
fifty Jewish children under twelve, who had heard that candy was to be
given away.

Many of the meetings that wither and die are conceived in the finest
spirit of service. If they aim to interest the whole neighborhood,
irrespective of cliques and prejudices, they almost always fail--if, as
we Americans are supposed to do, we figure failure and success in terms
of quantity. Utopian schemes cannot long survive to-day, housed or not
in the scholarly and friendly surroundings of the library. A united
Ukraine cannot absorb the attention of its supporters half as
continuously as the possibility of a new job in Ford's factory, and a
"decent dancing club" cannot always endure in the face of profits to be
made from a river excursion.

Probably of all municipal institutions, the library, while maintaining
its dignified and quiet atmosphere, may become the least formal and most
neighborly. It is a library truism that a librarian can tell from
repeated experiences just when a borrower is calling at the library to
announce her engagement or to proclaim that his new job has been
secured. Countless other bits of everyday news are exchanged over the
desk with real profit to the library and to the visitor. We feel in St.
Louis that the so-called wider use of the plant is only a tangible
expression of this same friendly relationship, justified on the one hand
by its economy and on the other, and to a far larger extent, by its
contribution to the community's legitimate social life.

Very fortunately for the tax-payer, and for the average reader, the
public library does not look upon its branches as intellectual clinics
for the poor. Like the public schools, its problem is to serve "all the
children of all the people," and consequently in localities other than
those where foreigners live, the same sort of branch building is
erected, with an auditorium open under the same regulations and used to
meet the needs of the particular neighborhood. The so-called "middle
class" has as fair a chance and as "good a time" in the li