Now the service of school and college furnishing definite instruction and perhaps training, to an organized body of youth, within a limited age, and under control, can be reasonably systematized and standardized. But the library is to furnish not merely education but enlightenment, and even culture, to the community at large--without respect to age, and without subordination to control. It cannot impose, it does not control. It may recommend, but it cannot direct. It must still respond to a need voluntarily expressed; but its duty is held to go further: it must remind that the need exists,--it must even inspire the need,--that is to say, the consciousness of it. In this way it is engaged in creating the very demand which later it seeks to satisfy. Now this duty upon it accounts for the prodigious energy in the effort itself, and the activity and range of the discussion, which are the characteristics of the modern library movement, particularly in English speaking America. It accounts for the incessant repetition of explanation, of exhortation, of recited experience, which give to a present-day library conference something of the aspect of a revival meeting. To librarians of the older school these are somewhat distasteful; to librarians of the more modern school already convinced and experienced, they may be tedious; but they seem necessary still for the enlightenment and encouragement of others newly entering upon the problem, of a public not yet fully familiar with the relations of it to their own welfare, and to the helpful solution of local problems where the idea meets conditions still impeding: for the field is vast and conditions are still very unequal. The efforts, still inchoate, include also many devices which are crude and of doubtful expediency: especially many designed chiefly to attract--in which the library seems to compete with other enterprises courting popularity in a way scarcely dignified for a public institution maintained by government. They shock the conservative in somewhat the same way as an advertisement by a lawyer or physician shocks the traditions of those reticent professions: and they include not merely schemes of advertising--which might seem to impair the dignity of the book, but auxiliaries for attracting attention such as savor of the devices of a business house in exploiting its goods. The ultimate aim is, of course, the commendation of the book itself,--and the justification lies--or is sought--in this. But the means,--well, the means often afflict the conservatives in the profession, and even cause uneasiness to certain of us among the progressives.