We may learn something from the efforts that have recently been made to minimize these two sins in charitable work and social service. Every city contains numerous charitable bodies, all trying to relieve want and alleviate suffering. They are frequently the prey of unscrupulous persons who manage to get their wants alleviated by three or four societies at once--by each, of course, without the knowledge of the others. The result is that there are no funds to relieve many worthy persons who accordingly suffer. The two sins in this case are being avoided by the simple establishment of a card-index at a central point. When an application is made for relief the index-office is informed by telephone, the index is consulted, and if it is found that the applicant is already receiving aid from some other source his request is politely but firmly refused. The present production of books gives us an instructive example of the existence of duplications and omissions on a large scale; and the elucidation of these will bring us a little nearer to the application of our principles to the library, toward which we are tending. I know not which is the more striking fact in connection with the publishing business--the continual issue of useless books--fiction and non-fiction, or the non-existence of works on vital subjects regarding which we need information. Of course this is due partly to the fact that the men who know things are also the men who do things. They are too busy to write them down. It is also due to the abnormal appetites of the semi-educated, which create a demand for the trivial and fatuous. The semi-educated person is intellectually young; he has the peculiarities of the child. Foremost among these is the love of repetition. The little one would rather hear his favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time than risk an adventure into stranger fields of narrative. There is something admirable about this when it leads to the adult’s love of re-reading great literature. But in the semi-educated it appears as an unlimited capacity for assimilating unreal fiction with the same plots, the same characters, the same adventures and the same emotions, depicted time after time with slight changes in names and attendant circumstances.