The first of these reasons would apply also to taxes for public schools, street paving, sewerage, and many other items of municipal expenditure and has no weight. With regard to the second argument it is not a sufficient reply to say that every one pays through the taxes, for this would apply equally well to free lodging houses, free lunchrooms and soup kitchens, free fuel, etc., all of which it generally believed tend to pauperize a city, except in great and special emergencies. The proper answer is that the free public library is an important and, indeed, necessary part of the system of free education which is required to secure intelligent citizens in our form of popular government, and that while in a few very exceptional cases free schools and free libraries may tend to improvidence or indolence or even to certain forms of crime, these rare cases are of no importance in comparison with the benefits which education confers upon the immense majority of the community and with the fact that without free schools and libraries a large part of the people will not be sufficiently educated to be useful citizens. With the regard to the third count, the public library, again, may be considered together with the public school. While it is difficult to trace to either specific instances of material or moral improvement, it is certain that the general diffusion of intelligence which both certainly effect does result beneficially in these directions. Communities with flourishing free schools and libraries are usually more prosperous and better than those without such facilities, and, while there is doubtless room here for a confusion of cause and effect, it is probable that there is both action and reaction. Prosperity calls for increased facilities for education and these in turn tend to make the community more prosperous. That the majority of books withdrawn from public libraries are works of fiction cannot be denied. Many librarians are wont to deplore this fact, and most libraries endeavor in one way or another to decrease the percentage of fiction in their circulation. The proportion of recreative reading in a public library is necessarily large. In like manner, the greater proportion of those who visit a zoological or botanical garden do so for amusement. Yet the information that they secure in so doing is none the less valuable and both are certainly educational institutions. So if in the public library a large number of its users get their history, their travel and their biography through the medium of recreative readings we should not complain. Were it otherwise these readers would probably lack altogether the information that they now certainly acquire.