“But though the public library has an important function to perform in relation to educational institutions, its activities travel beyond assistance to formal education. It exists to serve the needs of a public with varied interests. It must satisfy the requirements of the serious student; but it must also cater for that large class of people who are ‘general readers,’ and those who go to books for recreation. The unsystematic and recreative reading which the libraries have stimulated do not, however, it seems to us, provide any argument for maintaining the public libraries as an independent municipal service.”[46] In the present writer’s opinion, the distinction drawn by Mr. Jast is a sound one, and is corroborated by the reluctance of American librarians to placing libraries under an authority primarily appointed to administer schools. But, since there remains so much in common in the aims of the two sets of institutions, if the supreme authority were entrusted with a scheme of education in the larger sense--call it culture, humanism, or personal development, since the term education smacks too much of the school and college--then it would be logical and salutary to put our public libraries under a department of that authority, making this responsible, side by side with the education department in the narrower sense, to the supreme Board--which may or may not continue to be called the Board of Education. Dread of bureaucratic control has become almost instinctive with thoughtful people. The habit of working in watertight compartments, and repressing every spontaneous activity that cannot be forced into the strait-jacket of official routine, inspires observant critics with distrust even of rural library schemes conducted on strictly official lines under education committees. To put the control of both urban and rural libraries in the preoccupied hands of those whose attention is centred in schools, discipline, and organized education, would be a blow at the freedom and elasticity of the library. After all, the problem of the young person is much the same everywhere, and education may for the most part be reduced to a system. People who have grown up and developed personality, however, will not submit to have their intellectual nutriment doled out on a system. They must have a say in managing and developing their own libraries, and in choosing the books they are to read.