not its product in the shape of books which are the results of careful research, or of books which are contributions to science, art, and industry; it is the work that the library does from day to day in stimulating the inquiring spirit, in adding to the interest in things, and in broadening the minds of the common people who form 90 per cent at least of the public library patrons. That is to say, the public library is chiefly concerned not in the products of education, as shown in the finished book, but in the process of education as shown in the developing and training of the library users, of the general public. It is from this common-folks-education point of view that the advocate of the open-shelf system looks upon the question of library administration. A free public library is not a people's post-graduate school, it is the people's common school. The more I see and learn of free public libraries the more I am convinced that a public library can reach a high degree of efficiency in its work only when its books are accessible to all its patrons. The free public library should not be managed for the use of the special student, save in special cases, any more than is the free public school. That it should be solely or chiefly or primarily the student's library, in any proper sense of the word, is as contrary to the spirit of the whole free public library movement as would be the making of the public schools an institution for the creation of Greek philologians. Everyone engaged in educational work, and especially those thus engaged who are most thoroughly equipped for the work in a literary way, and are most in touch with the literary and scholarly spirit, should have his attention called again and again to the needs of the crowd, the mass, the common people, the general run, the 90 per cent who either have never been within a schoolroom, or left it forever by the time they were thirteen years of age. And his attention should be again and again called to the fact that of the millions of children who are getting an education in this country today, not over 5 or 6 per cent at the outside, and perhaps even less than that, ever get as far, even, as the high-schools. The few, of course, rule and must keep the lamp burning, but the many must have sufficient education to know how to walk by it if democracy is to endure. And the school for the many is, and is to be, if the opinions of librarians are correct, the free public library; but it cannot be a school for the many unless the many walk into it, and go among its books, handle them, and so doing come to know them and to love them and to use them, and to get wisdom from them. CHAPTER XXXV Advice to a librarian [From Public Libraries, June, 1897]