And how about your library as a whole? Suppose it should be leveled by a tornado, or swallowed up by an earthquake, or swept away by a flood? What effect would this have on the life of your town? Would the passer-by point to the ruins, or to the hole in the ground where once your library stood, with the same kind and amount of interest that he would show when viewing the stump of an old tree or the fragments of a blasted boulder? Or would every man, woman and child feel the loss? Would the teachers seek in vain for aid, the merchants for information, the workmen for data of use to them in their daily tasks? In other words, is your library of such definite use in the community that it would feel your loss as it would that of a school house, a church, the railroad station, the principal retail store? Or would its loss affect that community only like the destruction of the monument on the green, or the fence around Deacon Jones’ pasture? If we are to make the library a vital influence in the community we must so conduct it that its loss would be felt as a calamity--that it could be spared no more than the postoffice could be spared, or the doctor, or the school. And we must do our best so to carry on every part of its work, every element that goes to make up its service to the public, that this part or element is contributing toward that service and not injuring it or delaying it. It is better for the community that we should be unemployed than mal-employed, and if the community should ever find out that we are the latter, we may be assured that unemployment will shortly be our condition, whether we like it or not. COST OF ADMINISTRATION[13] _The possibility of deducing a general method for calculating the probable cost of operation of a library._ The problem of ascertaining how the cost of administration of a library is related to the various conditions and factors that affect it is the problem of finding a formula in which, by simple substitution of numbers representing or corresponding to these conditions, a reasonable or approximate cost may be obtained. The data obtainable are the conditions and actual cost in a limited number of cases. The obstacles are the difficulty of stating certain of the conditions numerically and the difficulty of deciding on the form of the formula, which must be done in advance.