library need not crowd and struggle about among impatient children and miscellaneous masculine strangers. THE LEVY OF LIBRARY TRIBUTE The above title was constructed by the editor from a sentence in the presidential address of Henry M. Utley before the American Library Association at its Denver conference of 1895. President Utley himself gave it no title, but it is an examination of the claims of the library to public support, with a conclusion that those claims are justified only by regarding the library as an educational institution, using this term in its broadest sense. Henry Munson Utley was born at Plymouth, Mich., Aug. 5, 1836. He served on the staff of the Detroit _Free Press_ in 1861-66, was city editor of the _Post_ and _Post-Tribune_ until 1881, and then, after holding the secretaryship of the Detroit Board of Education, became in 1885 librarian of the Public Library, in which post he served until his death on Feb. 16, 1917, becoming librarian emeritus in 1913. We are met for the seventeenth Conference of the American Library Association in the Capital city of the Centennial State. It is a pleasing co-incidence that the Association and the State celebrate the same natal year. Within the memory of some of us the whole region of which this city is now the metropolis was a wilderness. The century was fairly begun when Lieut. Pike led his little band to the sources of the Arkansas and made his futile attempt to scale the lofty peak which now bears his name. Forty years later came the explorations of Fremont, and then fifteen years elapsed before the tide of immigration set in. The desert of that day has been converted into prosperous farms. Thriving towns have sprung up in the mountain fastnesses, at the gateway to which sits this Queen City of the plains, displaying all the evidences of wealth, culture, and refinement to be found in the proud cities to the eastward.