An essential purpose is a most important element in the future history of children’s rooms, and at the present initial stage it were unwise to criticise the methods by which the library is trying to state this purpose in definite terms. But whether we regard its activity in the direction of the home, the school, the settlement, or the city at large, we may safely claim that its main duty in all directions is to supply the best books to be had on any stated line. And herein we discover the connection that ought to exist between our schools as educational, and our libraries as cultural centres. In Buffalo, Mr. Melvil Dewey, during an address given to teachers, said: “By law, the children are put under your influence in their earlier years, when, if ever, they can be taught to love good books so well that in all their lives thereafter they will seize on every opportunity to read them. If the librarians, with their wing of the educational army, can select and catalogue and provide free of cost the best on every subject, the schoolmen, with their wing and with their immensely larger resources both of money and men--and still better, of devoted women--must send out from the schools, year by year, boys and girls who will be lifelong patrons of the public library, and will, in due time, help to send their own children along the paths which have proved for them so profitable and pleasant; ... but its great work should be the partial recognition that education is no longer for youth and for a limited course, in a school to which they give most of their time, but that it is really a matter for adults as well as youth, for life and not for the course, to be carried on at home as well as in the schools, and to be taken up in the hours or minutes of leisure, as the proper accompaniment of their regular business or labour. This means that education must be carried on by means of reading, and that, if the librarians are to furnish the books and give all necessary help in their proper field, the schools must furnish the readers.” It is, therefore, the supreme function of a supervisor of school libraries to reconcile culture with knowledge-getting--taste and desire with mental training--quite as much as it is his official duty to furnish supplementary books for the class-rooms. In fact, the former should become his chief business, for in the other capacity he slightly encroaches upon, rather than aids--duplicates in expense, rather than enforces by supplying a need--the work being done by the neighbourhood library. Between the school and the library there should thus be a reciprocal interchange of courtesies, the sum total of which tends toward culture.[53] For the child is the potential man, and in our reading, despite the opportunities for education, we are not made to understand, at the early age when habits are most readily formed, the real import of the sustaining power of art.