raveler theory" of the library. The implication, of
course, is that it is an ignoble or unworthy theory. I have no objection
to accepting the phrase, for in my mind it has no such connotation. The
commercial traveler has done the world service which the library should
emulate rather than despise. He is the advance guard of civilization. To
speak but of our own country and of its recent years, he is responsible
for much of our improvement in transit facilities and hotel
accommodations. Personally, he is becoming more and more acceptable. The
best of our educated young men are going into commerce, and in commerce
to-day no one can reach the top of the ladder who has not proved his
efficiency "on the road." Would that we could place men of his type at the
head of all our libraries!

We need not think, however, that there is anything new in the method of
distribution by personal travel. Homer employed it when he wished his
heroic verse to reach the great body of his countrymen. By personal travel
he took it to the cross-roads--just as the distributor of food and
clothing and labor-saving appliances does to-day; just as we librarians
must do if we are to democratize all literature as Homer democratized a
small part of it. Homer, if you choose to say so, adopted the
"commercial-traveler theory" of literary distribution; but I prefer to say
that the modern public library, in laying stress on the necessity of
distributing its treasures and in adopting the measures that have proved
effective in other fields, is working on the Homeric method.

Now, without the people to whom he distributed his wares, Homer would have
been dead long ago. He lives because he took his wares to his audience.
And without its public, as we have already said, the public library, too,
would soon pass into oblivion. It must look to the public for the breath
of life, for the very blood in its veins, for its bone and sinew. What,
then, is the part that the community may play in increasing the efficiency
of a public institution like the public library? Such an institution is,
first of all, a medium through which the community does something for
itself. The community employs and supports it, and at the same time is
served by it. To use another homely illustration, which I am sure will not
please those who object to comparing great things with small, this type of
relationship is precisely what we find in domestic service. A cook or a
housemaid has a dual relat