o it quietly and unobtrusively like any other private
citizen, but he needs all his efforts, all his influence, to bring the
book and the reader together in his community. Sometimes by doing this he
can be doing the other too, and he can always do it vicariously. He should
bear in mind that the successful man is not he who does everything
himself, but he who can induce others to do things--to do them in his way
and to direct them toward his ends. Even in the most sluggish, the most
indifferent community there are these potential workers with enthusiasms
that need only to be awakened to be let loose for good. The magic key is
often in the librarian's girdle, and his free offer of house room and
sympathy, with good literature thrown in, will always be of powerful
assistance in this kind of effort. He will seldom need to do more than to
make clear the existence and the nature of the opportunity that he offers.
I know that there are some librarians and many more teachers who hesitate
to open their doors in any such way as this; who are afraid that the
opportunities offered will be misused or that the activities so sheltered
will be misjudged by the public. It has shocked some persons that a young
people's dancing-class has been held, under irreproachable auspices, in
one of our branch libraries; others have been grieved to see that
political ward meetings have taken place in them, and that some rather
radical political theories have been debated there. These persons forget
that a library never takes sides. It places on its shelves books on the
Civil War from the standpoint of both North and South, histories of the
great religious controversies by both Catholics and Protestants, ideas and
theories in science and philosophy from all sides and at all angles. It
may give room at one time to a young people's dancing-class and at another
to a meeting of persons who condemn dancing. Its walls may echo one day to
the praises of our tariff system and on another to fierce denunciations of
it.

These things are all legitimate and it is better that they should take
place in a library or a school building than in a saloon or even in a
grocery store. The influence of environment is gently pervasive. I may be
wrong, but I cannot help thinking that it is easier to be a gentleman in a
library, whether in social meeting or in political debate, than it is in
some other places. In one of our branches there meets a club of men who
would be terme