The architectural style of a library building is often properly made to conform with some style peculiar to the locality or regarded as suitable for it. The Riverside Public Library in California is properly in the Spanish colonial or Mission style; that of New Haven, Conn., is a modified New England Colonial, the Jackson Square Branch in New York is Dutch, the Chestnut Hill Branch in Philadelphia and the Public Library in Harrisburg are of the irregular stone masonry so familiar in many parts of Pennsylvania. Some of the branches in Portland, Ore., used to be and perhaps still are of wood, built of the Douglas fir of the surrounding region. The power of the purse is an important thing in libraries as elsewhere, and possibly we should have taken up earlier the variations of library income with locality. Not only are some communities better able to support a library than others, but of two with equal ability one will excel in interest and willingness to give. An attempt to regulate income by rule is the requirement of the Carnegie Committee that a municipality shall appropriate for the support of a library in a Carnegie Building, not less than ten per cent. of its cost. I know that the condition is primarily stated the other way around. The town is supposed to decide what it can give to support a library and then the Carnegie Committee is willing to capitalize this at ten per cent. But the library once built, its cost becomes the fixed item and the appropriation the variable one, and in many cases it has varied so far downward as to constitute a violation of the town’s library contract. Of late the Committee is making an effort to detect and tabulate these violations and to use them as a basis for withholding donations in neighborhoods where they have been frequent. A man is known by the company he keeps, and it may be just to regard with some suspicion one who lives in a neighborhood where dishonest persons congregate. Still, towns are unlike men, since their locations are fairly permanent, and it scarcely seems right to turn down Jonesville’s request for a Carnegie library because Smithtown, 35 miles away, has been unable to appropriate the ten per cent. that it promised. The Committee has also made what I regard as the mistake of finding fault with the library that suffers from an unduly reduced appropriation, instead of with the city or town government that is responsible for the reduction. To throw blame on the head of an institution that has just been robbed of its birthright would seem to be adding insult to injury. But despite the failure of this particular effort at standardization, there seems to be a feeling that library incomes should be so far standardized as to be calculable from the particular set of circumstances under which the library is working. The State of New York once attempted to regulate its library appropriation by home-use alone--so many cents per volume circulated. This was a very