I have said that in distribution we bring to the individual what he wants or what he needs. That sounds a little tautological, but it is not. A man often wants whiskey when he doesn’t need it at all, and conversely a boy sometimes needs a whipping--but he doesn’t want it. So with the reading public. They often want fiction of a class that they do not need, and have no longing for books that would really benefit them. Here we may mote a difference between the free library and all merely commercial systems of distribution. As the purpose of the latter is to make money, wants are regarded rather than needs. But even with a store there are limitations. If any one wants an injurious article--for instance, a poison or an explosive--the law steps in to prohibit or regulate. And even outside the limits of such regulation, the personal sense of responsibility to the community that governs the actions of an honest merchant will prevent his attempting to satisfy certain wants that he believes would better remain unsatisfied. So, too, certain books are without the pale of the law--they would be confiscated and the librarian would be punished if they were circulated. Beyond these there are many books that we do not circulate simply from our sense of general responsibility to the community. The difference between our work and that of the merchant in this regard lies chiefly in the more extended scope left for our own judgment. No librarian thinks of circulating illegal literature; his only care is to exclude such of the allowable books as he believes should not, for any reason, be placed on his shelves. Here, sometimes, popularity and usefulness part company. The librarian may yield entirely too much to the wants--the demands--of the community and neglect its needs. His aim should be to bring the wants and the needs into harmony so far as possible, to make his people want what will do them good. This might be dubbed “the whole duty of a librarian.” Few, I am afraid, attain to the full measure of it, and too many fail even to realize its desirability. Of course if you can bring the full force of a reader’s conscience to bear on his reading--if you can make him feel that it is his duty to read some good book that strikes him as stupid, you may make him stick to it to the bitter end, but such perfunctory reading does little good. The pleasure one gets in reading is a sign of benefits received. Even the smile of the boy who reads George Ade is a sign that the book is furnishing him with needed recreation. The pleasure experienced, we will say, in reading Shakespeare is of course of a far higher type; yet I venture to say that if that pleasure is absent, the benefit is absent too. Nine-tenths of the distaste felt for good standard books by the average reader is the result of the mistaken efforts of some one to force him to read one of these books by something in the nature of an appeal to duty. There is no moral obligation to read Shakespeare if you