So, at least so I trust, all the methods and tools of library work are based on common sense--catalogues and charging systems and classifications are very useful indeed, but only as short cuts to certain results that would otherwise not be achieved or would be arrived at too late or too confusedly. We must learn all about these, but the time will come when we shall leave the library school and enter the library. Here no sort of rule, formula, method or process will suffice for us, essential though they all are; if we are to make good we must add common sense, adaptability, resourcefulness, initiative. Possibly you think that I have been applying the principle of conflict between progression and stagnation somewhat carelessly--now to your own training as librarians and again to the service rendered by the library itself. In truth these are intimately connected. Progressive assistants make a progressive library. A staff that does its work mechanically will operate a library without initiative. If your habit of mind has grown to be a habit of regarding all the technical detail of library work as part of nature’s law, you will be shocked at a suggestion that the library of which you are a part should undertake some public service that a library never undertook before. You may know already--you certainly will know soon--that this question of the extension or limitation of library service is still a burning one in many minds. Libraries to-day are doing a thousand things that no one of them would have thought of doing fifty years ago. That some of these things are foolish or ill advised I have no doubt. We now occasionally hear it said that there should be some authoritative statement or agreement on what public libraries, at any rate, ought to do and what they ought not to do. But we Americans do not take kindly to limitations of this sort, although they are familiar in countries where service of all kinds is more standardized. We read in a recent magazine article of the trials of Mrs. James Russell Lowell with English servants, when her husband was American minister in London. Wishing to have a loose corner of carpet nailed down, she called on one after another of her domestic staff, only to be told that the clearly-defined duties of each did not admit of that particular item of service. She finally lined them up on one side of the room, tacked down the carpet herself and then discharged every one of them. This sort of thing does not seem to Americans like efficiency. If some needed bit of service in an American town remains undone, and church and school and library all look the other way because it does not fall within a carefully-limited sphere of duty which each has assigned to itself, we shall count them all blameworthy, especially if it shall appear that one of them is equipped to perform that particular service easily, cheaply and well. The church and the school have both taken this view, and the modern extension of the library’s