Public education has given long and careful thought to those who remain in school. It is just becoming conscious of the great majority who do not remain--the great majority whom necessity, choice, or lack of adaptation of the school to the child drive yearly into the rough school of life. At present the best that schools do for these is to provide each child with the means of self education--the ability to read. But we are to remember that this is only one of the instruments of education; it is not education itself. It is no discovery, and it needs little observation to point out, that with this instrument of reading, the newspaper, the magazine and the book are the potent educators of our day. They are, or should be, the bulwark of democracy. I am not concerned to discuss this further than to show that what we have vaguely depended solely upon our schools to do, is not done by them, and never has been done by them. For the great mass, our schools give each child the one open sesame--reading. There they leave him to open what doors he can and will. Before I suffer as a heretic, let me quote a really thoughtful man, Thomas Carlyle, called by a breezy miss in our last civil service examination "the great English apostle of hope." You remember that, in speaking of the origin of universities, Carlyle in his Heroes said, "If we think of it, all that a university or final highest school can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. The place where we are to get knowledge is the books themselves. It depends on what we read after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books." Possibly there is a little something "proverbial" about this, and perhaps it should be mixed with a trifle of Mark Hopkins on the end of a log. But a collection of books, be it large or small, is a library. That definition still holds, though we may have to include "skittles and beer" after awhile. It is quite clear that this aspect of a library as a distinct and active factor in education has only of late impressed itself upon the public mind. It marks the library as a vitalized public utility, from which we are to expect more than has yet been received. Even the best of schools has its limitations because of the inflexibility of its courses of study, and it may fail, often does fail, to touch with any spark of living fire. But the library may provide something for every type of mind. The library cannot create mind or the will and disposition to use it, any more than the school can. But where the desire to feed any mental craving exists, it would be a very poor library indeed that cannot satisfy it in some degree. This power of the right book to supplement the school, or even to take the place of it, is not yet comprehended in any fullness in our public education. But it is just in this power of the book that a library has