I realize that I may be regarded as tossing a firebrand among you when I tell you to develop your initiative. An unwise or uncontrolled initiative may do harm, but I fervently believe that greater harm is done every day by the lack of all initiative. Better than any stagnant pool is a running stream, though it break bounds and waste itself in foam and spray. There may be those who will say: Let the student first learn to obey without question; when he has done this it will be time to talk to him about initiative. Alas! that will also be the time when he has lost the chance to develop it intelligently. No, the accepted standards and the ways of progress must be assimilated at one time. Rather than unquestioning obedience to an order, a rule or a formula, let us have appreciation of the reason for it and disobedience whenever a breaking of the letter may keep us more closely to the spirit. I can assure you that you will make better assistants if this is your temperament, that librarians are looking earnestly for more of this kind, rejoicing when they see the spark of life among the dead wheels and cogs of the library machinery, determined to give any one who shows it an opportunity to show more of it, by promoting him to a place of greater effort and of higher responsibility and service. When such a promotion comes, perhaps over the heads of others with better training and longer experience, there is often wonder and a disposition to explain it all by “favoritism”. And viewed from the proper angle, this is correct; every chief librarian has his favorites; they are those on whom he has learned that he can depend, not only for solid and accurate knowledge of facts and methods but also for quick and ready response to the slightest change of conditions--for appreciation of what is needed in a given set of unusual circumstances and resourcefulness in devising new methods or modifying old ones to meet the emergency--what I have already summed up in the one word initiative. Every teacher, and every student knows that a good arithmetician may fail utterly when he comes to state and solve problems in algebra. His success has been due to the memorizing of rules and their application. When he is confronted with the necessity of putting into mathematical symbols the fact that A, B and C can do a piece of work in 3, 4 and 5 days, respectively, he is stumped because an entirely different sort of demand is made on his intelligence. And when his teacher explains how the statement may be made, although he has learned how to state that particular class of problems, he is just as much at sea when he is confronted with the question of how soon after 12 o’clock the hands of a watch will again be together on the dial. In other words, he has left the land of rules and entered the region of common sense. If he is bright, he very soon realizes that all mathematics is common sense; that rules are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to mechanical processes.