Take, for instance, labor performed under an age-limit rule for children, such as nearly all libraries once possessed, and such as is still enforced in some places. If it is true that the library ought not to be used by children below a specified age, work done in ascertaining their ages and in excluding those barred out by the rule is necessary and valuable. If this is not true; if the exclusion of such children may be actually harmful to the community, it follows that all such work is the most flagrant kind of mal-employment. But there may also be mal-employment in the course of work of undoubted advantage to the library and its public. If in the course of such work something is done that sets it back instead of helping it on, or that injures the library in some other way more than it helps by what it directly effects, labor expended on that thing is mal-employment. This is a more fundamental and elementary thing than lack of efficiency. If an assistant is cataloguing books well, but much more slowly than she ought, she is not efficiently employed, but neither is she mal-employed, for she is doing nothing that directly injures the work. If she were to stop, the library would be injured, not benefited. But if she is making egregious blunders in her work, causing undue labor in revision or making the catalogue confused or misleading in case her cards should get into it, it might be better for the library if she were to stop work, and she is surely mal-employed. The public is apt to generalize from insufficient data. The user who is treated rudely or sullenly at the desk just once does not say, “I will make a record of this and of my subsequent experiences and see whether it is a usual thing or an abnormal one.” Not at all. He or she at once reports in conversation that the public library assistants are continuously rude and disagreeable, and the machinery is forthwith set in motion that makes or mars reputation. We may chafe at this; we may try to disregard it, but in the end we shall have to accept it as a fact of human nature. The public institution that wants to acquire that valuable asset, reputation, whether it is a reputation for kindliness, for helpfulness, for common sense, for scholarly acquirements, will have to make up its mind to be kind, helpful, sensible, and scholarly, not fifty per cent or seventy-five per cent of the time, but one hundred per cent of the time.