But what if two of our doctors disagree? Then follow the advice of both. It might be disastrous for a patient to take two kinds of medicine, but it can never hurt a library to contain books on both sides of a question, whether it be one of historical fact, of religious dogma, or of scientific theory. This may not be pressed too far; the following of one side may be beneath our notice. It is not absolutely necessary, for instance, for a small popular circulating library to contain works in advocacy of the flatness of the earth or of the tenets of the angel dancers of Hackensack; but it is essential that such a library should make accessible to its readers the facts of the Reformation as stated by both Catholic and Protestant writers, histories of the American Civil War written from both the southern and northern standpoints, geological works both asserting and denying the existence of a molten core in the earth’s interior. An impartial book is hard to find; it is a thing of value, but I am not sure that two partisan books, one on each side, with the reader as judge, do not constitute a winning combination. Against violent and personal polemics, of course, the librarian must set his face. All such are candidates for rejection. It is fortunate for us in this regard that we are supplying the needs of all creeds, all classes and all schools. Each must and should have its own literature while each protests against violent attacks on its own tenets. Such protests, while often unjustified, are helping us to weed out our collections. So much for deficiency in truth as a cause for rejection. Now let us consider deficiency in goodness and deficiency in beauty; or stated positively, badness and ugliness. These two things are confounded by many of us. Is this because the great majority of librarians to-day are of the sex that judges largely by intuition and often by instinctive notions of beauty and fitness? To most women, I believe all ugliness is sinful, and all sin is ugly. Now sin is morally ugly, without doubt, but it may not be esthetically so. And goodness may be esthetically repulsive. Badness and ugliness in books are both adequate grounds for rejection, but they need not coexist. Some of the worst books are artistically praiseworthy and would be well worth a place of honor on our shelves if their beauty alone were to move us. On the other hand, some books that are full of impropriety or even of indecency are absolutely unimpeachable from a moral standpoint. Shakespeare and the Bible are often indecent without being in the least immoral. “Raffles” is in no wise indecent, but is dangerously immoral. Bernard Shaw is often both indecent and immoral while at the same time so astoundingly clever that we stand gaping at him with our mouths wide open while he tosses down our throats the most unsavory things.