It is very common, where the exaction of an admission fee is forbidden, to take up a collection before or after the lecture. When told that this is inadmissible, the lecturer sometimes takes up his collection on the sidewalk outside. There have been cases where employees of a library have embraced this opportunity to gather contributions. A colored janitor of a branch library was recently admonished for standing outside his own assembly-room door and soliciting money for a pet charity. Another janitor made a pilgrimage to the central library to collect from the staff. A classic instance of this kind is that of the street gamin who for several hours stood at a branch library door and collected an admission fee of one cent from each user. The branch was newly opened and its neighbors were unused to the ways of free libraries. An example of the difficulty of deciding, in matters of this kind, whether an undoubted advertising scheme may or may not legitimately be aided by the public library is found in the offer, with which all of you are familiar, of valuable money prizes for essays on economic subjects, by a firm of clothiers. The committee in charge of the awards is composed of eminent economists and publicists; the competitors are members of college faculties and advanced graduate students; the essays brought out are of permanent value and are generally published in book form. Under these circumstances many libraries have not hesitated to post the announcements of the committee on their bulletin boards. Others regard the whole thing as purely commercial advertisement and refuse to recognize it. One library at least posted the announcement of the competition for 1910, but refused to post the result. It would be hard to tell just how much altruism and how much selfishness we have here and the instance shows how subtle are the gradations from one motive to the other.