The CHAIRMAN: Those of us who have gone to Washington have sometimes thought we should revise our boyhood's interpretation of the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Nothing I had ever imagined from St. John's description was quite a match for the glory and magnificence of the beautiful Library of Congress. I have found it delightful to think of a nation of great wealth providing such a fitting home for its literary treasures. Books are the friends and ministers of the mind and the soul of the people. The Washington building is the expression in materials of their aspirations for what is best and most beautiful. It is a wonderful building, leaving impressions of wonder on the casual visitor, and still more on those who linger in its chaste corridors and see something of the working of the library itself. I think of the sweet and stately beauty of the place, I think of the institution and its services, and I think also of the man who is more than a match for the magnificence of the home of those books. We will now hear from the man, Dr. HERBERT PUTNAM. ADDRESS BY DR. PUTNAM Our acknowledgments as visitors having now been made by the highest authority among us, it is not for the purpose of merely enlarging them that I am assigned a place upon the program. It is rather, I understand, with the view to an expression in behalf of the community of interest represented by this gathering as a whole; and some definition as to what we are, what we aim at, and wherein, if at all, we differ from our predecessors. Our aim is in terms a simple one. It is to bring a book to a reader, to lead a reader to a book. The task may indeed vary in proportion as the book is obvious or obscure, the reader expert or a novice, so that our service may be as the shortest distance between two simple points; or as the readiest point between two distances. But its main and ultimate end is the same. And it remains so in spite of organization grown elaborate, apparatus and mechanism grown complex. For the organization is merely to respond to a larger and more varied demand, and with a view to a more ample and diversified response.