I ought to say in the first place that the suggestion that the librarian would sell books for a profit is one of those queer things that crop out in connection with all great movements. I never yet heard of any library that was buying books and distributing them. I believe that the library will order books in connection with other work. My thesis is this: the book owned is a great deal better than the book loaned. I believe it is better for a man to own a book than to borrow it; that it is legitimate, at public expense, to show him that book in the library and hand it to him as his book--just as legitimate an expense, every way, as it is to employ a man to sell people books so that they won't patronize the Booklovers' Library. I think the whole thing hinges there. It is not a matter of theory, but of fact. If that is what we want to accomplish, can we do it best with the book store or with the library? I contend that it is impossible to rehabilitate the old bookseller, any more than the old private school, which could be done only by endless means in endowment. I do not believe we should try, because it can be done better and cheaper in another way; because the library has the books on its shelves. The statistics this morning showed that the bookseller is dying out. I believe it to be entirely impossible to rehabilitate that profession. If in the library it becomes a recognized principle that the library is supported at public expense for the purpose of lending books. I am confident that the public will demand it to be done in that way. I am confident of another thing. You have only to consult your catalogs to see the remarkable development of the last decade in publishing which is done by endowed universities and colleges and of learned societies. See the great body of technical journals that have been turned over the university presses. Every university that pretends to accomplish much now has a press, and is developing it with great rapidity. It was said this morning that the publisher hinged on the cash; that the bookseller hinged on that. Ladies and gentlemen, the cash profit is not a proper scale in which to weigh the questions in which we are interested. When you take questions of education, or religion, or philanthropy, and put them on a question of cash profit, you are in an absolutely false attitude. I do not mean by that that we must not regard business conditions. We must know how to pay for our coal and our rent, but not a dividend in dollars and cents. And the moment my antagonist says that this question is to be measured by a cash dividend, I say he is ruled out of court in any body of librarians who are giving their lives and their work at salaries not at all commensurate, but who make dividends on a higher plane. There is no occasion for an attitude of hostility; nor, I take it, for me to take issue on this new proposition in regard to prices to libraries. There is not a librarian in this room who has all the money he wants.