No aspect of the library's operation is more full of interest than that which takes account of its uplifting influence. The analogy between its service and that of the postal system has been noticed; but it has a no less real analogy to the work of the school, the pulpit, or the press--yet without the propagandist principle which so often attaches to these latter--namely, in the principle of growth or advance. In the earlier portion of this paper a little space was devoted to showing that in the nature of the case the number of copies of any work of fiction used in the course of a year would immensely out-number those which could possibly be read in the more solid departments of reading. Even were the constituency of the library confined to a selected few, to whose minds the higher class of reading was congenial, this would be the case. Nor should we forget that the ground of distinction between a "public" library and any other, as the library of a scientific society, a debating society, a theological school or a teachers' club, is that its constituency _is_ not thus limited to a selected class but is broad as humanity itself, with all its enormous inequalities of condition, taste, and mental growth. Like a mirror, therefore, the recorded classified circulation reflects this variety. Even with this apparently almost unmanageable unevenness, appreciable improvement in standards of reading is by no means an unknown experience. There lies before the writer, for instance, a library report which is able to make such a statement as this: "The fiction percentages of the seven successive years, beginning with 1883 and ending with 1889, show an uninterrupted decline, as follows: 70+, 66+, 62+, 61+, 58+, 56+." But it must be remembered also that figures such as these, though they may tell a part, and a very gratifying part, of the advances which individual readers have been helped to make, fall very far short of expressing the whole. It would be entirely possible for individual after individual thus to advance from good to better, and from better to best, and yet the figures which express the aggregate use of the year remain stationary (or even retrograde), because the constituency of a public library (particularly in a large city) is all the time being reenforced by new readers. And these new readers comprise both those who are children in age and those who are children in mental growth, who begin at the foot. When, therefore, there is anything more than a preserving of a uniform level--as in the noteworthy figures above quoted--it stands for a very striking advance indeed, on the part of a very large portion of the community. Probably every librarian in charge of a public library in a large city has had an opportunity of observing these advances in innumerable individual instances. And this class of results, while distinctly following the "order of nature," does not by any means come about through a view of library administration which regards either