lorless. The workday
aspect of the world is always with us and oppresses us. For the average
man and woman, whose education has been limited, whose imagination has
lacked all wider opportunity for cultivation, the easiest escape from
the cares of daily life, from the depressing monotony of daily routine,
will be through the avenue opened by the story, the people's road out of
a care-filled life, ever since the days of "Arabian Nights." Such
readers as these desire fiction and ought to have it. If their
imagination can be cultivated to the point of reaching similar freedom
from care through poetry, through the drama, or through any of the
higher forms of literature, so much the better. The library's message is
to men and women cramped by toil and narrowed by routine, ever seeking
some way out of this troublesome world into that larger realm which is
more truly ours because it is our creation and that of our fellows. This
wider world, in its friendliness and homelikeness, the library must
represent.

The library is where the readers are introduced to the friendship of
authors and their books. There they are at home and there we too may be
at home. Old and young, rich and poor, wise and simple, men and women
and children, there we may meet new friends on kindly and familiar terms
and widen our thoughts as we learn of their wisdom and their wit. Still
better, there we may renew our acquaintance with old friends and feel
the contracted horizon of our lives again enlarge as we meet them once
more. New friends and old, they all greet us with an assured welcome and
yield to us the best which they can give, or we receive. We come to them
not to learn lessons but to be with them for a little while and to live
with them that larger and truer life which their presence creates for
us.

Thus the library performs its high and noble duty of helping men to
live, "not by bread alone, but by every word of God," who, through good
books, has been speaking to the generations of men not only for their
instruction but even more for their delight.

E. A. BIRGE.

VALUE OF FREE LIBRARIES

The best proof of the value of public libraries lies in the cordial
support given them by all the people, when they are managed on broad,
sensible lines. Such institutions contribute to the fund of wholesome
recreation that sweetens life and to the wider knowledge that broadens
it. They give ambition, knowledge and inspiration to boys and girls
from sor