In a recent striking address, Prof. William James has called attention to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”--something to enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas represented by such phrases--catchwords, if you choose to call them so--as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness, civic duty--have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records, with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,” who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good, that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading, stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that contribute to individual and civic development. The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?