did homes, and win them from various forms of dissipation. They
form a central home where citizens of all creeds and conditions find a
common ground of useful endeavor.

Libraries are needed to furnish the pupils of our schools the incentive
and the opportunity for wider study; to teach them "the art and science
of reading for a purpose," to give to boys and girls with a hidden
talent the chance to discover and develop it; to give to mechanics and
artisans a chance to know what their ambitious fellows are doing; to
give men and women, weary and worn from treading a narrow round,
excursions in fresh and delightful fields; to give to clubs for study
and recreation, material for better work, and, last but not least, to
give wholesome employment to all classes for those idle hours that wreck
more lives than any other cause.

F. A. HUTCHINS.

"Even now many wise men are agreed that the love of books, as mere
things of sentiment, and the reading of good books, as mere habit, are
incomparably better results of schooling than any of the definite
knowledge which the best of teachers can store into pupils' minds.
Teaching how to read is of less importance in the intelligence of a
generation than the teaching what to read."

THE BOOKLESS MAN

The bookless man does not understand his own loss. He does not know the
leanness in which his mind is kept by want of the food which he rejects.
He does not know what starving of imagination and of thought he has
inflicted upon himself. He has suffered his interest in the things which
make up God's knowable universe to shrink until it reaches no farther
than his eyes can see and his ears can hear. The books which he scorns
are the telescopes and reflectors and reverberators of our intellectual
life, holding in themselves a hundred magical powers for the overcoming
of space and time, and for giving the range of knowledge which belongs
to a really cultivated mind. There is no equal substitute for them.
There is nothing else which will so break for us the poor hobble of
everyday sights and sounds and habits and tasks, by which our thinking
and feeling are naturally tethered to a little worn round.

J. N. LARNED.

THE LIBRARY'S EDUCATIONAL MISSION

To the great mass of boys and girls the school can barely give the tools
with which to get an education before they are forced to begin their
life work as breadwinners. Few are optimistic enough to hope that we can
change this condition v