And the responsibility should include not merely a zeal for the general reader, but a regard for the scholar: since a benefit to the general reader may end with himself, but a benefit to the scholar becomes amplified and diffused through him. He is not, be it understood, a class by himself. He includes the specialist whose vocation is research in a particular field; but he includes also the reader for whom research is but an avocation. He is the unusual man, but he is also the usual man in his unusual moments. What is the conscious aim of the one may be the incidental achievement of the other--to advance knowledge. And the aid rendered by the library to either may be of a consequence to the community more far reaching than the mere diffusion of ascertained knowledge among a multitude of individuals. If the effort of our libraries in this direction has not kept pace with their efforts in the others, the explanation is obvious in the emphasis necessary upon the others during the past fifty years. But the time has come when the obligation to the scholar should resume its due place--in our programs, as well as in our practice. And with the resumption of that interest may we not hope for a recognition--a recognition--in our organizations also of that type which gave personality to the libraries of old?--I mean the type represented by the Panizzis, the Garnetts, the Winsors, Pooles, Cutters and Spoffords. For however indifferent such men may have been, or might be today, to the mere mechanism which of late we have been exalting, and which we must hold to be necessary under modern conditions, they succeeded in producing an atmosphere which had a potency of its own, which no mere mechanism can reproduce, and for which the zeal of routine personal service, however "missionary" in spirit, cannot be a substitute. For the mechanism gives the impression of intervening between the reader and the book; and the routine personal service fails from the very nature of its effort. The reader reached out to may be pleased and aided: but he loses the lesson and the penetrating suggestion afforded by the mere absorption of the old-time librarian in the book itself. It was that which once took the visitor out of himself, away from affairs, and gave him touch with a different world, a sense of different values. Does he not miss it now? I think he does; and that, however he may respect the mere efficiency of the modern librarian, as administrator, his really affectionate admiration turns back to the librarian of the old school whose soul was lifted above mere administration, or the method of the moment, or the manner of insistent service, and whose passionate regard was rather for the inside of a book than for the outside of a reader,--even the librarian to whom a reader seemed indeed but an interruption to an abstraction that was privileged.