I see no limit to the usefulness of this building and of the institution whose home it is to be. The house is new but its occupant has been long and favorably known to your citizens. Indianapolis has library traditions, and is what we librarians call a “good library town.” Your library has had good leadership and it is to continue, adding the force and freshness of the new to the strength and experience of the old. The memory of your dearly loved poet will be brought to the mind of each library user--by the children’s room that bears his name, by the land that he gave to enlarge its site, by this enduring portraiture--by a thousand and one things, none the less cogent for being intangible. I look to see this library, in the home city of James Whitcomb Riley, grow into a place in the public heart comparable with that which was attained by Riley himself. It should be loved for its broad minded humanity, for its sympathy with mankind, especially with little children, for its readiness to “rejoice with those that do rejoice and weep with those that weep,” for its quick response to the personal and spiritual needs of every reader, and above all for its firm hold on the realities of life and its appreciation of life as something that is lived on the farm, in the city street, in the office, the school and the club, not in the clouds, not in fog and mist, not with the improbable or the impossible. That it will do and be all these things we may be confident. Riley the well beloved is gone. His memory lives on; let it live with peculiar force and vividness in this library, in its attitude toward those whom it serves--in the affection which they in turn feel toward an institution that has long been, and will long continue to be a center of literary, civic and intellectual force in the city where Riley lived and wrote. THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY The years immediately succeeding the great war are to witness great progress in team-work. The war is teaching us to get together, and it is impossible to believe that the lessons we are now learning will be suddenly and totally forgotten with the advent of peace. The world is full of institutions, associations, corporate bodies of all kinds, founded on a knowledge of what may be accomplished by the cooperation of individuals; but the cooperation of these bodies themselves, one with another, has been faulty until recently.