Now, there has been one difficulty of late years in bringing about this result, in the most effective way, and that difficulty has been felt not only in this country, but throughout most countries--the fact that competition, not in quality but in "cut rate" price, has practically taken away the living of the commercial intermediary in the distribution of books, the hire of the laborer who is working in that particular vineyard. That has been true in Germany, in France, in England, and in this country. It has not prevented the sale of books; it _seems_ not to have limited the sale of books; but it is probably true that the dissemination of the best literature among the mass of the people, in private libraries, while it has been immensely improved by the library system, has not been promoted by the bookselling system under present conditions as it should be. In Germany, a movement has been on foot for a few years past, and has been quite successful, to give that particular kind of librarian, the bookseller, a fee more worthy of his function; a profit which makes it possible for him to keep that sort of library which is distributed into private libraries, _i.e._, the book store. In France a very curious difficulty is in illustration. There the price of books had come to be very low, so low that when a rise in the price of paper came, the publisher's business was found to be almost impossible. The remedy naturally took the shape of a general rise in price, a considerable rise in price in cheaper books, sufficient to meet that particular difficulty and to make possible at the same time a better recompense, a living wage, to the intermediary. Now, the whole tendency of modern industrial development is to get rid of the intermediary as much as possible; _i. e._, to have as few steps, of person and of cost, between the producer and the consumer as is practicable. This we may take as fundamental to-day. It remains true, nevertheless, that there must, as a rule, be somebody between the producer and the consumer, between the person in the great manufacturing center and the remote distributing points on the circumference to bring the thing wanted to the person who wants it; and it is only in view of that requirement that the bookseller is to be considered. In that sense, as I have said, he seems a complement of the librarian, and the book store the complement of the library. Now, a librarian cannot live without salary, though many live on very small salaries, in the hope of better things--and one of the accomplishments of the American Library Association has been to bring better things to the librarian. Both the dignity and the emolument of the library profession have been, I believe, increased greatly by the existence of this Association. The librarian receives a salary, and it is not true, as we all know, that books can be circulated freely from public libraries in the sense of their being circulated without cost. Indeed,