And what is it all about? In the broadest sense, as I have already said, we librarians are the purveyors of ideas stored up in books. These ideas are more to man than mere education--they are life itself. Life is growth, not stagnation--it involves change and acquisition. “Life is change,” says Cardinal Newman, “and to be perfect, one must have changed many times.” To contribute the opportunity and the stimulus for such change is our business. The child cries out to his environment--“Give me ideas and experiences; good and pleasurable if you can, bad or painful, if you must, but give me ideas and experiences.” Part of this craving it is the duty of the public library to satisfy. The craving may grow less keen as we grow older, but it never really ceases to exist. To satisfy that craving in legitimate ways and to guide and control it if we can is our business, stated in the broadest possible terms. That is what we are aiming at. The librarian should be the broadest minded of mortals. He should be a man in the widest sense--to him nothing human should be alien. This is decidedly broad and correspondingly vague. Being so, it may be interpreted by every worker in the way that appeals to him most. To one, the educational work of the library will make the strongest appeal; to another its recreational function. One may prefer to lay stress on the guidance of children’s reading; another on reference work with adults. These are all phases of one and the same general class of acts--the imparting of ideas by means of books--and there is no reason why each worker should not gain interest in that work by and through the particular phase that appeals to him. “I wish,” says one of James Lane Allen’s characters, “that some virtue--say the virtue of truthfulness--could be known throughout the world as the unfailing mark of the American. Suppose the rest of mankind would agree that this virtue constituted the characteristic of the American! That would be fame for ages.” We librarians, in like manner, not only wish but strive to make some one virtue characteristic of our work--say the virtue of usefulness. “As useful as a librarian,” “As indispensable as the public library”--these are not yet, I am afraid, household phrases. But why should we not make them so? LIBRARY STATISTICS It is a valuable exercise to examine into the origin and uses of the things that we have been accustomed to take for granted and to regard almost as part of the accepted order of nature. The result will often be startling and it will always be salutary, if the examiner be sane and conservative. Therefore a very good way to begin a discussion of statistics is to query whether they are of present value at all, or whether they are old fashioned rubbish and had better be discarded.