It is always a pleasure to watch things grow, to be able to keep them on and guide their growth in useful directions. A library is no exception to the rule. Even growth in size--the simplest kind--has its satisfactions, but extension of service is still more interesting. It is well that there should be a little mystery between the librarian and his public--a consciousness of problems yet to solve, of service yet to be rendered. It is well that he should be on the lookout for latent demands--those hungers and thirsts that he knows must exist somewhere and that he is eager to satisfy; it is well that his community should regard the library as a place with opportunity and willingness for service yet unrevealed as a reservoir of favors yet unbestowed. This is a living relation, not one of mere juxtaposition. I never envied the kind of service that old Atlas did the world, in standing eternally with it on his shoulders. That was an image of dull, burdensome despair. How much better our modern vision of a spinning globe, circling through space, with all its brother and sister globes dancing around it! And however miraculous it seems, we know that whenever we get up and walk across the room there is a tiny adjustment of balance throughout the whole vast system. There are social balances, too, as well as celestial, and when the library puts out its foot to take a forward step, I believe that they all respond. These things that libraries are doing have their part in the vast social adjustments in the midst of which we live. Some day a social historian will arise to describe them and set them in their place. I am frequently disappointed when I take up some book describing a movement or an application of energy in which I know that the library has borne a part, to find that its share has been absolutely without recognition; that the word “library” is not even in the copious index. We have been busy doing things--here in the seclusion of the library family we may say that they have been things worth the doing. Some day we, too, shall have our Homer or our Milton. Let me remind you that this has all been illustrative of my principle that library service, like every other kind of mundane activity, is a phase of the eternal struggle between keeping still and getting somewhere else. At the close of a recent novel one of the most thoughtful of current English writers, Mr. J.D. Beresford, states the issue thus (I quote from memory): “Virtue is only continued effort; a boast of success is really a confession of failure”. Of course, continuance of effort, virtuous though it may be, will be of little avail without ability, intelligence, common-sense--at least a modicum of those qualities whose complete combination makes up that wholly impossible creature, the Perfect Librarian. Training will not give you these--the Almighty bestows them at our birth--but it will develop such as you have already--and none of us lacks all of them.