library or our art
museum! These gentlemen are leading the way in a movement which ought to
be widespread. They have faced, not a theory, but a condition, and they
will discover that, so far as immediate popular use is concerned, the
theater is of more importance in a community than either the art museum
or the public library. If they give the people what will interest the
people, ... if they arrange for popular prices, secure good actors, and
treat the theater as a community institution in the same sense as an art
museum and a library are community institutions, the "Outlook" has small
doubt of their success.'

However the Pittsfield experiment turns out, considered, as it should
be, as a sign of the times, it tells us emphatically--first, that the
present system of meekly taking whatever plays are sent on from New
York by a monopolistic commercial management, for its own good, is by
intelligent citizens seen to be anti-civic. Again, it tells us that
the shortest cut to give the community open access to all the dramas it
wants itself or may assimilate for its needed pleasure and development
is naturally seen to be the public library method as first established
by Boston and since approved and adopted by all public-spirited
communities.

This method was devised to give the community free access to all the
books it wants for pleasure, profit, and advancement. A similar device
to give the community cheap access to all the plays it wants for the
same purposes may readily follow by a correspondingly practicable path
of administration by a special commission. The same path thus proved
good by test of time and utility for the library has since been followed
with adaptation to its different purposes by the park commission.

The commission administering the public library and employing experts
to operate it in all its departments and fields of activity has for many
years accomplished and continued its civic work not merely adequately
and thoroughly, but with superiority and distinction. This originally
self-appointed group of citizens was fired with the desire not to do
an exclusive or sectional work but to put upon its feet for the whole
municipality a civic institution. It proceeded toward this goal by
so shaping the undertaking that the city should ultimately accept and
assume charge of it as its own.

All the facts of experience we have go to prove that this public library
method of providing the shortest cut efficientl