These books we will be urged to buy in large duplicate, and when we, holding to the ideal of the library as an educational force, refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do parents may be counted upon to present the same in quantities sufficient to weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond cure by teachers the most gifted. There are two principal arguments--so-called--hurled at every librarian who tries to maintain a high standard of book selection. One is the "I read them when I was a child and they did me no harm" claim; the other, based upon the doggedly clung- to notion that our ideal of manhood is a grown-up Fauntleroy, infers that every book rejected was offensive to the children's librarian because of qualities dangerously likely to encourage the boy in a taste for bloodshed and dirty hands. Now, in this day when parents are frantically protecting their children from the deadly house fly, the mosquito, the common drinking cup and towel; when milk must be sterilized and water boiled and adenoids removed; when the young father solemnly bows to the dictum that he mustn't rock nor trot his own baby-- isn't it really matter for the joke column to hear the "did me no harm" idea advanced as an argument? And yet it is so offered by the same individual who, though he has survived a boyhood of mosquito bites and school drinking cups, refuses to allow his child to risk what he now knows to be a possible carrier of disease. The "what was good enough for me is good enough for my children" idea, if soberly treated as an argument in other matters of life, would mean death to all progress, and it is no more to be treated seriously as a reason for buying poor juvenile books than a contention for the fetich doctor versus the modern surgeon, or for the return to the foot messenger in place of electrical communication. It would be tactless, if not positively dangerous, if we children's librarians openly expressed our views when certain people point boastfully to themselves as shining products of mediocre story book childhoods. So I would hastily suppress this thought, and instead remind these people that, as a vigorous child is immune from disease germs which attack a delicate one, so unquestionably have thousands of mental and moral weaklings been retarded from their best development by books that left no mark on healthy children. In spite of the probability that there are to-day alive many able-bodied men who cut their first teeth on pickles and pork chops, we do not question society's duty to disseminate proper ideas on the care and feeding of children. Isn't it about time that we nailed down the lid of the coffin on the "did me no harm" argument and buried the same in the depths of the sea?