The State, whatever it may or may not do, should recognise the library as being as essential to public welfare as is the school, and it should give it as careful protection from dangers without and within as it gives to institutions like banks and insurance companies. The State should protect the library against unjust laws, improper interference, or pernicious influence of any kind from without. It should guard it also against misconduct, incapacity, or neglect on the part of its trustees, officers, or employees. Beside the direct appropriations for its support, it should grant the most liberal powers for holding property given by individuals for the public benefit, and, above all, should grant entire exemption from taxation. To tax a free public library for doing its beneficent work is theorising gone mad. It is as absurd as for a missionary to refuse admission to his preaching, or for the manager of a theatre in which a fire has just started to shut out every fireman till he had presented the conventional coupon for a reserved seat. The example first set by my own State (New York) in the statute which I had the honour of drawing ought to be followed universally. We created a public libraries department, to devote its entire attention to advancing the best interests of public libraries. It would take the entire morning to sketch to you the various forms of beneficent work which we have found practicable. We help to establish new libraries, reorganise old ones, revise methods, select books, lend single books or entire libraries, grant books or money up to $200 yearly to any library raising an equal sum from local sources, and, by means of correspondence, personal inspection, and steady work in a dozen directions, help every community to get the greatest practical good from the labour and money given to its free library. We have now about five hundred travelling libraries moving about in all parts of the State. The public library is rapidly becoming universal. For the Government not to recognise it in its own organisation is as absurd as it would be to have a standing army and no war department, or schools dotted all about the state and no department of education. Time forbids more than the mere naming of what is needed, but the first great step in summing up the relation of the State to public libraries is the establishment of a public libraries department, in charge of a strong man who appreciates the almost limitless opportunities for usefulness which this new field affords.