ion to the mistress of the house, who is at the
same time her employer and the person that she directly serves. This sort
of relation does not obtain, for instance, in the case of a railroad
employe, who is responsible to one set of persons and serves another. The
public library is established and maintained by a given community in order
that it may perform certain service for that same community directly. It
seems to me that this dual relationship ought to make for efficiency. If
it does not, it is because its existence and significance are not always
realized. The cook knows that if she does not cook to suit her mistress
she will lose her job--the thing works almost automatically. If the
railroad employe does not serve the public satisfactorily there is no such
immediate reaction, although I do not deny that the public displeasure may
ultimately reach the railroad authorities and through them the employe. In
most public institutions the reaction is necessarily somewhat indirect.
The post office is a public institution, but public opinion must act on it
generally through the channels of Congressional legislation, which takes
time. Owing to this fact, very few postmen, for instance, realize that the
persons to whom they deliver letters are also their employers. In all
libraries the machinery of reaction is not the same. In St. Louis, for
instance, the library receives the proceeds of a tax voted directly by the
people; in New York City it receives an appropriation voted by the Board
of Apportionment, whose members are elected by the people. The St. Louis
Public Library is therefore one step nearer the control of the people than
the New York Public Library. If we could imagine the management of either
library to become so objectionable as to make its abolition desirable, a
petition for a special election could remove public support in St. Louis
very soon. In New York the matter might have to become an issue in a
general election, at which members of a Board of Apportionment should be
elected under pledge to vote against the library's appropriation.
Nevertheless, in both cases there is ultimate popular control. Owing to
this dual relation, the public can promote the efficiency of the library
in two ways--by controlling it properly and by its attitude toward the
service that is rendered. Every member of the public, in fact, is related
to the library somewhat as a railway stockholder, riding on a train, is
related to the compa