Our friends, the Socialists, whose propaganda is receiving more attention from thoughtful men to-day than it did a few years ago, both because of the truths that it presents and the menace that it offers to our present civilization, are making the mistake of dwelling upon the importance of the worker’s comfort rather than that of the worker’s improvement. They promise us that we shall all be in comfortable circumstances and will have to work only three hours a day. Incidentally, the output is to be better. But by putting the matter thus, instead of the other way about, they have appealed to the element of laziness that exists in all men--they have held out the prospect of idleness instead of labor. I have not lived west of the Mississippi long enough to know whether the same conditions obtain here as in the East; but there, comparing things to-day with what I remember of my boyhood, I seem to see an increasing tendency among all workers to put self first and work second. The policy of “ca’ canny,” as they call it in Scotland--of “go easy”--doing as little as one can and still keep his job--is creeping in and has secured a firm foothold. It is increasingly difficult to get any kind of work, manual or mental, done really well--so well that one feels like saying, “Well done, thou faithful servant.” And yet the shirkers are all anxious to get to the top; and they wonder why they do not. They comfort themselves by saying that success nowadays is solely a matter of pull. But it is not so. Look around you and you will see, for the most part, men in charge of large enterprises who are efficient, and who have put work before self--men who are engrossed in what they are doing, who love it and therefore do it effectively. There never was a baser slander than the common assertion that we Americans love money. If we loved the dollar for itself alone, we should never sling it about as we do. We love the excitement and the fun of making money. Look at our working millionaires! They want no more money; they can not use what they have. They enjoy the task of owning and running a great railway system, of organizing and managing some great industrial combination. We may find it necessary to clip their wings a little, but we can not call them lazy and inefficient--they make the job too hard for us. There is no “go easy” policy here, and those who favor it will never get to the top. Let us hope that this pernicious idea that self is worth more than work will never find a foothold in the library. We see it here and there, but I believe that, taken by and large, library workers love their tasks and that they are efficient in proportion to that love.