vidual. This
involves, where the injury is not committed in the presence of any
library officer, so as to be observed, but has been done while the book
was drawn out, an examination of each volume before giving it out. If
this rule were to be observed as to all, it would entail an expense that
few libraries could afford. In a large circulating library in a city, it
might require the entire time of two assistants to collate the books
before re-issuing them. The circumstances of each library must determine
how to deal with this matter. Probably the majority will limit the close
examination of books before giving them out, to cases where there is
reason to suspect wilful continued soiling, scribbling, or dog's-earing.
A few such cases once detected and dealt with will have a most salutary
restraining influence upon others, especially if re-enforced by frequent
and judicious paragraphs in the local press, setting forth the offense
and the remedy.

But all in vain will be the endeavor to abate these defacements and
consequent waste of the library books, unless it is enforced by a
positive law, with penal provisions, to punish offenders who mutilate or
deface books that are public property. A good model of such a statute is
the following, slightly abridged as to verbiage, from an act of Congress,
of which we procured the enactment in the year 1878:

"Any person who steals, defaces, injures, mutilates, tears, or destroys
any book, pamphlet, work of art, or manuscript, belonging to any public
library, or to the United States, in the District of Columbia, shall be
fined ten dollars to one hundred dollars, and punished by imprisonment
from one to twelve months, for every such offense."

This act will be found in the United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 20,
p. 171. It would be well if the term "periodical" were added to the list
of objects to be protected, to avoid all risk of a failure to punish the
mutilation of newspapers and magazines, by pleading technical points, of
which lawyers are prone to avail themselves in aiding offenders to escape
conviction.

It will be observed, that the word "deface," employed in this statute,
actually covers the marking of margins by any reader, all such marking
constituting a defacement within the meaning of the law.

While the great multitude of readers who frequent our public libraries
are honest and trustworthy, there are always some who are conspicuously
the reverse. It is rarely safe