ibrary are certainly worth paying for.
Hundreds of small cities and towns tax themselves for electric plants
and count themselves fortunate. No one seems to regret this taxation for
electric lights which illuminate the citizen's way at night. Should
there not be an equal or greater readiness on the part of a community to
establish a library and so illuminate the mental horizon of every
citizen?

A public library is a necessity, not a luxury. Every community which
realizes this and establishes a library, proclaims itself an
intelligent, progressive town and one worth living in.

CHALMERS HADLEY.

The opening of a free public library is a most important event in any
town. There is no way in which a community can more benefit itself than
in the establishment of a library which shall be free to all citizens.

WILLIAM McKINLEY.

PUBLIC LIBRARY, A PUBLIC OPPORTUNITY

Modern industrialism exacts from the artisan and the worker in every
branch, skill and knowledge not dreamed of years ago. He who would not
be trampled under foot needs to keep pace with the onward sweep in his
particular craft. The public library furnishes to the ambitious artisan
the opportunity to rise. Upon its shelves he may find the latest and the
best in invention and in method and in knowledge. Never in the history
of the country has there been such a desire manifested among the adult
population for continued education as may be noted to-day. Does it not
speak eloquently of ambition to rise above circumstances--that same
spirit that we have admired in our Franklins and our Lincolns and the
long roll of self-made men whose lives we are proud to recall? And so
library extension takes note of adult education, and combining its
forces with university extension, realizes that broader movement
variously termed home education, popular education and the people's
college.

The library gives heed to the future, and thus does not neglect the
child. The intelligent work of the children's librarian, supplementing
the related work of the teacher, aims to develop the individual talent
or dormant resource which finds no chance for expression where children
are necessarily treated as masses. And we may never know what society
has lost by failure to quicken into life this dormant talent for
invention, for art, for literature, for philosophy. "The loss to society
of the unearned increment is trivial compared to the loss of the
undiscovered resource." Had retard