The reason was that printed information of this kind either did not then exist or was thought improper for collection by a scholarly institution. If anyone had asked for it I know what the librarian would have said, for the same thing is occasionally still said by librarians, and I hear it at department stores and everywhere else where there is distribution of objects necessary to our lives. They would have said--“There has been no demand for it, so we don’t need to keep it.” Demand for it! Of course not. Is there any demand for fish in a sand-bank or for free-trade arguments in a stand-pat Republican newspaper? People go for things where they know the things are to be found; and they knew well fifty years ago that none of these things were to be found in a library. The sad thing is that altho the libraries have reformed, hysteresis is still getting in its deadly work. There is a lag of apprehension and appreciation among our business men, many of whom think the library is still the same old dusty, cobwebby institution of 1850. Take my word for it, it is not. It stocks all the things that the librarian used contemptuously to call _biblia abiblia_--books that are no books--city directories by the hundred, trade maps, commercial information, trade catalogs, advertising folders, railway announcements, hundreds of things that will answer the questions that every business man wants, or ought to want, to know. We, or any other library, may not have precisely what you want. We are not yet perfect and we have much to learn. But we are buying and putting at the business man’s disposal the kind of material that will help him in his business. The modern library is democratic, not autocratic. It does not hand you down a volume from a very high shelf and tell you that is exactly what you want and you mustn’t ask for anything else. It says: we are the agents of a co-operative concern. For convenience sake, just as in the case of the public schools, you conclude to tax yourselves to maintain a public collection of books, instead of having to form private collections of your own, smaller and vastly more expensive. We are in communication with every one of you by telephone. The machine for which you have paid is all ready to work--stoked and cleaned and oiled. Why don’t you press the button? Those who don’t are just suffering from hysteresis--lag of apprehension. They think the library is what it was in 1850. They are behind the times. Am I not afraid that if all the business men should press the button at once, the library would be swamped? There would be a little swearing at first, I fear. But ultimately there would be a realization that a library built and stocked and manned to serve perhaps 50 business men at once cannot serve 500 or 5000. There would be pressure on the legislature; we should have the necessary funds and in short order we should be serving our 5000 as smoothly as we served our 50.