The immediate problem, therefore, necessitates a glance at this field of children’s literature, and some knowledge of its essential details. It involves a contact with books of all grades; it calls into play, with the increasing number of libraries, and with the yearly addition of children’s rooms, a keen discerning judgment on the part of the librarian, not only as to child nature, but as to the best methods of elimination, by which bad books may be separated from good, and by which the best may preponderate. But the librarian is not the only factor; the parent and the writer also come into account. They, too, must share a responsibility which will be more fully determined later on, but which now means that they both owe the child an indispensable duty; the one in giving to the growing boy or girl most intelligent guidance along the path of fullest development; the other in satisfying this need--not in deflecting juvenile taste by means of endless mediocrity and mild sentimentalism. It is an unfortunate circumstance that the effects of mediocrity are longer-lived than the immediate evil itself. In the problem of children’s reading we must consider two aspects; there is the bogey image of a theoretical or sociological or educational child, and also the book as a circulating commodity. There is the machinery of “The Child”; Dr. Isaac Watts shaped one; Jean Jacques Rousseau another; the Edgeworths still another, and now the psychologist’s framework of childhood, more subtle, more scientific, more interesting, threatens us everywhere. But no patent has so far supplanted the fundamental excellence of human nature. There are assuredly demarkations and successive steps in elementary education, but are not these becoming too specialised? Since we are dealing with the Boy and the Story rather than with the Scholar and the Text-book, with culture which is personal, and not with expediency, we needs must choose the human model in preference to all others. And so it is with the choice of the librarian. In dealing with books in the bulk, there is a tendency to emphasise system above the humanising excellence of what the books contain. After all the mechanical detail is done, when the cover has been labelled, when the catalogue notation has been figured, when the class distribution has been determined, the librarian stands middleman in a threefold capacity. She is a purveyor, in the sense that she passes a book over the counter; she is a custodian, in so far as books need protection; she is the high priestess, since the library is a temple of treasures, a storehouse for our literary heritage. In any library, whether it be yours at home, with your own books upon the shelves, or the public’s, with volumes representing so much of your taxation on which you base your citizenship, the rare companionship of books is one of their humanising qualities. This is as much a truth for children as for grown-ups.