This has been called the age of utilitarianism. Such it unquestionably is, but its practicality is not disassociated from idealism. The resources of numberless commercial enterprises are each in this day reckoned in millions, and their products are figured in terms of many millions more, as once thousands represented the spread of even the greatest of industries. But more and more, business men are coming to realize that business organization as it affects for weal or woe thousands who contribute to their success, must be conducted as a trust for the common good, and not merely for selfish exploitation, or for oppression. As the trade guilds of old wielded their vast power for common ends, so all the workers gave the best at their command to make their articles of merchandise the most perfect that human skill and care could produce. Men of business whose executive skill determines the destiny of thousands in their employ, are growing more and more to an appreciation of the trusteeship that is theirs. A humane spirit is entering the relationship between employer and employed. Great commercial organizations are conducting elaborate investigations into conditions of housing, sanitation, prolongation of school life, social insurance and similar subjects of betterment for the toilers; but a brief span ago they were concerned chiefly with trade extension and lowering of wages, all unconcerned about the living conditions of their dependents. They too are now exemplifying the possession of that constructive imagination which builds large and beyond the present. For results that grow out of experience and of experiment they also are in part dependent upon the sifted facts that are found in print. The business house library is a recent development, and in ministering in different ways to both employer and employed, gives promise of widespread usefulness. XI With the tremendous recent growth of industrialism and the rapid multiplication of invention, the manifest need for making available the vast sum of gathered knowledge concerning the discoveries of modern science has evolved the great special libraries devoted to the varied subdivisions of the subject. Munificently endowed as many of them are, highly organized for ready access to material, administered to encourage use and to give expert aid as well, their great importance cannot be overestimated. What they accomplish is not wholly reducible to statistics, nor can their influence be readily traced, perhaps, to the great undertakings of today which overshadow the seven wonders of antiquity. But there can be no question that without the opportunities that here lie for study and research, and--no less important--without the skilled assistance freely rendered by librarian and bibliographer, special talent would often remain dormant and its possessor unsatisfied. Greater here would be the loss to society than to the individual. XII