Nor can it fail to have a reflex influence in securing the interest of the public. If methods of the former class were able, by their direct agency, to accomplish practical results, even more significant and more permanent are those reached indirectly by this method. No class of people will be so truly attached to the institution, by active interest, as those who feel that they have been personally aided and improved through its agency. The former methods are directly adapted to secure popularity, the latter to win gratitude; and if it should ever become necessary to choose one of these, at the expense of the other, there can be little room for hesitation. The growth of public sentiment in communities like Boston and Worcester, where public libraries have been administered on these principles, and with these ends in view, for a series of years, is very instructive. Public sentiment, like confidence, is "a plant of slow growth"; but experience shows that when the conviction has once thoroughly penetrated a community that an institution like this is sincerely aiming to serve the public, a hold on its sympathy and interest has been acquired not easily to be shaken. It should be the aim of each librarian to make the usefulness of his institution so manifest that the public will as soon think of dispensing with the post-office as with the library. FINANCIAL SUPPORT The justification for taxing the members of a community to support a Public Library, although rarely questioned to-day was argued with heat in former times. Earlier, there was the same difference of opinion with regard to the public schools. In order to obtain the argument in opposition, in its best form, we have had to draw from a British source, which we consider it proper to quote here because it elicited a reply from an American librarian which will immediately follow: FREE LIBRARIES (AN ARGUMENT AGAINST PUBLIC SUPPORT) This paper, by M.D. O'Brien, forms Chapter IX of the compilation of essays entitled "A Plea for Liberty" edited by Thomas Mackay (3rd ed. London, 1894). The sub-title of the book, "an argument against socialism and socialistic legislation," gives its viewpoint. There is a formidable introduction by Herbert Spencer in which he condemns even the extremely limited state support given at that time to general education in England as a "tyrannical system tamely submitted to by people who fancy themselves free." Mr. Spencer ends by asserting that the end, if this sort of thing is to go on, "must be a society like that of ancient Peru, dreadful to contemplate, in which the mass of the people, elaborately regimented in groups, ... were superintended in their private lives as well as in their industries and toiled hopelessly for the support of the governmental organization."