To make the public library realize fully its possibilities as the People's University calls for more than the opportunity which every public library now offers; it requires active effort to reach out and bring the people to the library by the fullest co-operation with the school and by means of attractive lecture courses, which shall stimulate reading and guide it in profitable channels. But the beginning of this work--the inculcation of a taste for good reading--lies with the school, with the library's co-operation, especially during the years from six to ten or twelve, those years when nearly all the children come under the school's influence and when the habit of reading can be most easily formed. If charged with placing undue stress upon the value of the library, I might urge its comparative newness and its consequent lack of recognition; and, as an evidence of the latter, I might point to the fact that in this great educational exposition, while one vast palace is given up to exhibits of the school, the library has with difficulty secured a part of a room in the Missouri State Building for an exhibit of its activities in the great work of education, in which, as I am trying to show, its potentialities are as great as those of the school. As our Board of Directors said, in its appeal to the exposition Directors for a separate library building: "The library, besides being the most efficient and most economical agency for popular education, represents all the fair will have to show. It stands for the sum total of human knowledge. It is the instrumentality through which knowledge has been conserved and cumulated. Only through the library can civilization continue to advance.... Books are the most potent factors in progress. Without books we should have had no powerful locomotives to show, no wireless telegraphy, no wonder-making machinery, no beautiful buildings, no impressive statuary, no paintings to arouse wonder and yield delight--no World's Fair to draw distinguished scientists and educators from all over the world."