fact has already been noted that in a case like
this the citizen is both an owner and a beneficiary. He has duties and
privileges in both capacities, but he sometimes acts the owner in the
wrong place. The man on the warship was doubtless an owner, but at that
particular moment he was only a visitor, subject to whatever rules might
govern visitors; and he should have acted as such. Every citizen is a part
owner of the public library; he should never forget that fact. We have
seen how he may effectively assert his ownership and control. But when he
enters the library to use it his role is that of beneficiary, and he
should act as such. He may so act and at the same time be of the greatest
service to the institution which he, as a member of the public, has
created and is maintaining.

I know of no way in which a man may show his good citizenship or the
reverse--may either demonstrate his ability and willingness to live and
work in community harness, or show that he is fit for nothing but
individual wild life in the woods--better than in his use of such a public
institution as a library. The man who cannot see that what he gets from
such an institution must necessarily be obtained at the price of
sacrifice--that others in the community are also entitled to their share,
and that sharing always means yielding--that man has not yet learned the
first lesson in the elements of civic virtue. And when one sees a thousand
citizens, each of whom would surely raise his voice in protest if the
library were to waste public money by buying a thousand copies of the
latest novel, yet find fault with the library because each cannot borrow
it before all the others, one is tempted to wonder whether we really have
here a thousand bad citizens or whether their early education in
elementary arithmetic has been neglected.

Before the present era there were regulations in all institutions that
seemed to be framed merely to exasperate--to put the public in its place
and chasten its spirit. There are now no such rules in good libraries. He
who thinks there are may find that there is a difference of opinion
between him and those whom he has set in charge of the library regarding
what is arbitrary and what is necessary; but at any rate he will discover
that the animating spirit of modern library authority is to give all an
equal share in what it has to offer, and to restrain one man no more than
is necessary to insure to his brother the measure of