achievements are our own, our intellectual and esthetic standards are borrowed. Our intellectual status may thus be compared to the electrical condition of the trolley wire, which in order that it may furnish its useful energy to the motor below must itself be supplied at intervals with this energy from an adjacent feed wire communicating directly with the source of electrical power. The feed wire in our case is the library--a collection representing the intellectual energy of all past ages, springing directly from the powerful brains of the masters of mental achievement throughout the centuries. Unless we supply our minds from this, we shall not maintain our intellectual position. Is this the reason why the popular library has attained with us a development that it has never reached in Latin countries, whose inhabitants possess through heredity many of the mental standards of value that our ancestors borrowed and that we must borrow ever and again from the records of the past? We may be sure that this is at least a possibility; and we may be equally sure that the adoption of system, both external and internal, will facilitate both this and all other functions of the library. The statement that “the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life” was never intended to mean that we are to neglect formal and systematic methods of work. The letter kills only when it is spiritless, with the spirit to give it life it does well its part, ensuring that the institution to which it applies shall produce its results, surely, quietly and effectively, with a minimum of noise and effort and with a maximum of output. Let no one, then, deride or decry the formation or the operation of a library machine; we live in an age of machinery--of machines formed by effective human co-operation, as well as by interlocking gears and interacting parts. Rudyard Kipling makes his Scotch engineer see in the relentless motion of his links and pistons something of that “foreknowledge infinite” in which his Calvinistic training had taught him to believe and trust. So may we see in library machinery an aid to the accomplishment of that “far-off divine event” toward which our whole modern library creation has been and is still silently, but no less powerfully moving--the bringing into intellectual relationship of each living human brain within our reach with every other companionable or helpful human brain, though physically inaccessible through death or absence. This is the comprehensive ideal of the librarian; no machinery that may work toward its attainment is superfluous or inept. THE EXPLOITATION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY[11] Two and a half years ago; or, to be more exact, on January 22, 1909, in an address at the dedication of the Chestnut Hill Branch of the Free library of Philadelphia, the present writer used the following words: