I might quote similar utterances from many other eminent educators as to the value--the necessity--of the library in early education; but I can think of no stronger summing-up of the subject, nor from higher authority, than this statement from President Eliot: "From the total training during childhood there should result in the child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should direct and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling which results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main end of elementary education; and that schooling which does not result in implanting this permanent taste has failed.... The uplifting of the democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the taste for good reading." To persons who have given little thought to educational questions these utterances will have the weight that attaches to the highest authority; but we need no university president or national commissioner to tell us these facts. We have learned them from our own experience; and, enlightened as we now are, it seems to us strange that question could ever have been raised as to the essential character of the library in elementary education. Yet there are some of us, I am sure, who can recall painful consequences from putting into practice an educational theory not generally accepted by the pedagogues of our childhood days. We know that higher education is impossible without a library, for the library is the storehouse of the world's knowledge, the record of humanity's achievements, the history of mankind's trials and sorrows and sufferings, of its victories and defeats and of its gradual progress upwards in spite of frequent fluctuation and failure. In this chronicle of the past lie lessons for the present and the future; from the lives of storied heroes comes the inspiration that leads the race onward and upward. A university without a library would of necessity have a very small and weak faculty--only the few professors who could be induced to go where the most important instrumentality of their work was lacking: the university that has an adequate library includes in its faculty the professors of all other universities and all the great teachers of all countries and ages. But is it worth while to consider a university without a library? Can there be such an institution? In higher education, then, the library is a necessity. In elementary and secondary education it is no less essential, if the most is to be made of the few years that the average child spends in school and if he is to be started on a path of self-culture. On this point Stanley Jevons says: "In omitting that small expenditure in a universal system of libraries which would enable young men and women to keep up the three R's and continue their education, we spend £97 and stingily decline the £3 really needed to make the rest of the £100 effective."