I believe that it will. And yet I do not see how the library can escape exercising judgment. For there is no other responsible authority which can be brought to exercise it. We must then expect numerous decisions which will offend a portion of the community. They will usually be on the conservative side--of exclusion. And it is for those who believe that a public library should be a conservative influence in the community to see that it has the authority and is protected in its exercise. Not that in respect of the violent books there is great injury in present conditions. In the public libraries of to-day there exists no doubt material sufficiently anarchic to upset society, if it could have its will upon society. The fact is, that though there is plenty in literature that is incendiary, there is little in our community that is inflammable. The good that the libraries do is obvious and acknowledged. They represent the accumulated experience of mankind brought to our service. They are the custodians of whatever is most worthy of preservation in our own life and literature. They are the natural depositories of what we have of memorial and of records; the original entries of legislation and of achievement. They must render history available; they must adequately exhibit science; they may help to refine by the best examples in each art, and in this they may also contribute to the industrial life of the community by educating the artisan into an artist, his craft into an art. And through record and description of processes and inventions they may contribute to the foundations of great industries. They touch the community as a whole as perhaps does no other single organized agency for good. They offer to the shyest ignorance equality with the most confident scholarship, and demand no formal preliminary which might abash ignorance. They have a profound duty--not generally appreciated--to help render homogeneous the very heterogeneous elements of our population. Thirty per cent. of it has come to us from an alien life and alien institutions. One-third of the people in our six leading cities are of foreign birth; seventy-one per cent. were either born abroad or born of foreign parentage. In the assimilation of this foreign element no single agency is perhaps so potent as our public libraries.