s in front of
which it belongs. The heart of the community is right. Its heroine is Mary
Pickford. It rises to realism as one man. The little dog who cannot pose,
and who pants and wags his tail on the screen as he would anywhere else,
elicits thunderous applause. The baby who puckers up its face and cries,
oblivious of its environment, is always a favorite. But the trend of all
this, these institutions cannot see. We librarians are seeing it a little
more clearly. We may see it--we shall see it, more clearly still.

The self-education of a community often depends very closely on bonds of
connection already established between the minds of that community's
individual members. Sometimes it depends on a sudden connection made
through the agency of a single event of overwhelming importance and
interest. Let me illustrate what I mean by connection of this kind. For
many years it was my duty to cross the Hudson river twice daily on a
crowded ferry-boat, and it used to interest me to watch the behavior of
the crowds under the influence of simple impulses affecting them all
alike. I am happy to say that I never had an opportunity of observing the
effect of complex impulses such as those of panic terror. I used
particularly to watch, from the vantage point of a stairway whence I could
look over their heads, the behavior of the crowd standing in the cabin
just before the boat made its landing. Each person in the crowd stood
still quietly, and the tendency was toward a loose formation to ensure
comfort and some freedom of movement. At the same time each was ready and
anxious to move forward as soon as the landing should be made. Only those
in front could see the bow of the ferryboat; the others could see nothing
but the persons directly in front of them. When those in the front rank
saw that the landing was very near they began to move forward; those just
behind followed suit and so on to the rear. The result was that I saw a
wave of compression, of the same sort as a sound-wave in air, move through
the throng. The individual motions were forward but the wave moved
backward. No better example of a wave of this kind could be devised. Now
the actions and reactions between the air-particles in a sound wave are
purely mechanical. Not so here. There was neither pushing nor pulling of
the ordinary kind. Each person moved forward because his mind was fixed on
moving forward at the earliest opportunity, and because the forward
movement of