Their most stimulating, most fruitful service must be the direct service. The service of the national authority must in large part be merely indirect. It can meet the reader at large only through the local authority. It can serve the great body of readers chiefly through the local libraries which meet them face to face, know their needs, supply their most ordinary needs. Its natural agent--we librarians at least must think this--is its own library--the library which if there is to be a national library not merely of, but _for_ the United States--must be that library. _Must become_ such, I should have said. For we are not yet arrived. We cannot arrive until much preliminary work has been done, and much additional resource secured from Congress. We shall arrive the sooner in proportion as you who have in charge the municipal and collegiate libraries of the United States will urge upon Congress the advantage to the interests you represent, of undertakings such as I have described. To this point we have not asked your aid. In the equipment of the library, in the reconstruction of its service, in the addition of more expert service, in the improvement of immediate facilities, our appeal to Congress has been based on the work to be done near at hand. I have admitted to you the possibility of these other undertakings of more general concern. If they commend themselves to you as proper and useful--the appeal for them must be primarily your appeal. THE TRUSTEESHIP OF LITERATURE--I. BY GEORGE ILES, _New York City_. Six months ago the curtain descended upon what is likely to be accounted the most memorable century in the annals of mankind. So salient are three of its characteristics that they challenge the eye of the most casual retrospection. First of all, we see that knowledge was increased at a pace beyond precedent, to be diffused throughout the world with a new thoroughness and fidelity. Next we must observe how republican government passed from the slender ties spun in the times of Washington, Jefferson and Adams, to the intimate and pervasive cords of to-day, when, as never before, the good of the bee is bound up with the welfare of the hive. Parallel with this political union of each and all there was a growth of free organization which, in every phase of life, has secured uncounted benefits which only joined hands may receive. Fresh torches of light fraternally borne from the centers of civilization to its circumference have tended to bring the arts and ideals of life everywhere to the level of the best. These distinctive features of the nineteenth century were in little evidence at its dawn, but they became more and more manifest with each succeeding decade. In American librarianship, as in many another sphere of labor, more was accomplished in the last quarter of the century than in the seventy-five preceding years.