Old-fashioned library committees and librarians still exist who are well content with the library assistant that, as they put it, “has gone through the mill,” in other words, a person without any education worth mentioning and without training in any real sense, who has learned his work by having had to do it and never studied the why or the wherefore of library practice. There are still librarians who regard librarianship as simply a job like any other job, which has got to be carried on and incidentally find some one a berth; and who feel aggrieved if called upon to furnish anything beyond the most rudimentary service--lending and reference library and reading room--and regard any sort of library extension as incipient bolshevism. Committees and librarians of this stamp actually prefer the uneducated junior, the youth, that is, who has enjoyed nothing more liberal than primary schooling; whereas the intelligent and progressive committee or librarian would rather appoint, even to a senior post, a well-educated person who has to learn his duties, than one poorly educated yet having had a great deal of practical experience. The former would have to spend some time in picking up the ways of a new post, but, given equal abilities, he would show himself the better man in a brief space of time. Perhaps a more insidious danger than this survival of the obsolete is the view, to which all administrators of systems are apt to fall a prey, that high mechanical efficiency is the be-all and end-all of library economy. Perfect and smooth-running machinery is an admirable thing; it will certainly be one of the characteristics of every library system that achieves complete success. But there are elements still more essential, which cannot be secured by the pursuit of mere mechanical perfection. To put mechanism and mechanical organization first, knowledge and ideas second, is as bad a mistake as crass content with the old, inadequate service. The danger of being dominated by mechanism is, in truth, as real a danger in the world of libraries as ever it was in Erewhon. “True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of the machines--they serve that they may rule.”[47] This very danger is already apparent, it has been noted, in some of the rural systems superintended by bureaucratic directors of education. Their criterion of efficiency is uniformity, in method and results. But uniformity is of no value except as a mark of excellence or fitness. When uniformity is sought for its own sake, it is bound to stultify aspiration and suppress spontaneity. In the earlier days of the public library, there were librarians who thought that they had achieved immortal fame by inventing that surprising piece of mechanism, the indicator. Library progress for decades was checked by the indicator and the