be free from the harassing and embarrassing petty annoyances and restrictions that are inseparable from such regulation. Much as I honor the advocates of civil-service reform, and applaud what they have accomplished in the way of furthering a real merit system, I submit that a further step in advance may be taken when we have heads of municipal departments as unlikely to make political appointments as the average librarian is, and as free from pressure to make such appointments as are the librarians of a large number of our best institutions. I regard that as the best system, therefore, in which an appointing officer or body, sincerely desirous of making appointments for merit only, is perfectly free to make such appointments in any way that seems proper; and as only the second-best system that in which the appointing power, unwilling to make appointments for merit, is forced to do so, as far as may be, by the supervision and control of a body created for the purpose. So long as we have unwilling municipal officers, we must endure this second-best plan, of course; but librarians are rarely of this kind, though they may be unfortunately in the power of those who are. It has been my good fortune to formulate a scheme of service for each of the four libraries to which I have referred, and these schemes, with necessary modifications, are still in satisfactory use. The first, for the New York Free Circulating Library, was made in 1896; the last, for the St. Louis Public Library, in 1910. Some were hampered by the necessity of adapting them to municipal regulation, while others were quite free; and other local conditions imposed differences upon them, but they depended, in the main, on the same principles and were carried out in much the same way. I have numerous requests for information on this subject and for advice upon methods of grading library staffs, with regulation of promotions, increases of salary, etc. Possibly the best way to answer these may be to give a brief account of the way in which the work was done in these four cases. It has been assumed by some that, as every good librarian desires to have these matters systematically regulated, regulation by a city civil service commission will be as good as any, and that a man who wishes to have a system of his own and keep it under his own control is unreasonable and foolish. A non-professional body, however, cannot, even with professional expert advice, satisfactorily regulate the employment of professionals for professional work. This point has been so often insisted upon and elaborated that those, who do not now appreciate its validity will never do so. Every good librarian will wish to create machinery to put the right man in the right place in his force, and to drop him out if he goes wrong; but it must be his own machinery, not that of someone else, and must be designed to aid him, not to hamper him.