d. To prescribe for
you most effectively, your physician should be an intimate friend. He
should have known you from birth--better still, he should have cared for
your father and your grandfather before you. Otherwise, he prescribes for
an average man; and you may be very far from the average. The drug that he
administers to quiet your nerves may act on your heart and give you the
smothers--it might conceivably quiet you permanently. Then the doctor
would send to his medical journal a note on "A Curious Case of Umptiol
Poisoning," but you would still be dead, even if all his readers should
agree with him.

I have no desire to bring about casualties of this kind. Let those who
know and love each particular club devote themselves to the task of
applying my treatment to it in a way that will involve a minimum shock to
its nerves and a minimum amount of interference with its metabolic
processes. It will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and a
revolution in clubdom is not going to be accomplished over night.

I have prescribed simple remedies--too simple, I am convinced, to be
readily adopted. What could be simpler than to advise the extermination of
all germ diseases by killing off the germs? Any physician will tell you
that this method is the very acme of efficiency; yet, the germs are still
with us, and bid fair to spread suffering and death over our planet for
many a long year to come. So I am not sanguine that we shall be able all
at once to kill off the programmes. All that may be expected is that at
some distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sort
will begin to commend itself to clubwomen. If, then, some lover of the
older literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomy
era when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fair
face of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of THE
BOOKMAN, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content.

BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES

The most distinctive thing about a book is the possibility that someone
may read it. Is this a truism? Evidently not; for the publishers, who
print books, and the libraries, which store and distribute them, have
never thought it worth their while to collect and record information
bearing on this possibility. In the publisher's or the bookseller's
advertising announcements, as well as on the catalogue cards stored in the
library's trays, the reader may ascertain when a