cation. These
impulses exist everywhere in great number and variety and we need only to
select the right one and reinforce it. Attempts to generate others are
rarely effective. When we hear the rich mellow tone of a great organ pipe,
it is difficult to realize that all the pipe does is to reinforce a
selected tone among thousands of indistinguishable noises made by the air
rushing through a slit and striking against an edge. Yet this is the fact.
These incipient impulses permeate the community all about us; all we have
to do is to select one, feed it and give it play and we shall have an
"educational movement." This fact is strongly impressed upon anyone
working with clubs. If it is desired to foster some movement by means of
an organization, it is rarely necessary to form one for the purpose. Every
community teems with clubs, associations and circles. All that is needed
is to capture the right one and back it up. Politicians well understand
this art of capture and use it often for evil purposes. In the librarian's
hands it becomes an instrument for good. Better than to offer a course of
twenty lectures under the auspices of the library is it to capture a club,
give it house-room, and help it with its program. I am proud of the fact
that in fifteen public rooms in our library, about four thousand meetings
are held in the course of the year; but I am inclined to be still prouder
of the fact that not one of these is held formally under the auspices of
the library or is visibly patronized by it. To go back to our thesis, all
education is self-education; we can only select, guide and strengthen, but
when we have done these things adequately, we have done a very great work
indeed.

What is true of assemblies and clubs is also true of the selection and use
of books. A book purchased in response to a demand is worth a dozen bought
because the librarian thinks the library ought to have them. The
possibilities of free suggestion by the community are, it seems to me, far
from realized, yet even as it is, I believe that librarians have an
unexampled opportunity of feeling out promising tendencies in this great
flutter of educational impulses all about us, and so of selecting the
right ones and helping them on.

Almost while I have been writing this I have been visited by a delegate
from the foundrymen's club--an organization that wants more books on
foundry practice and wants them placed together in a convenient spot. Such
a visi