But if the newspaper is to be treated as the organ of current history, then the newspaper room should be equipped with every facility for rendering current history real and intelligible. Maps of every part of the world should be hung over the reading stands. The room itself should be in the closest contiguity with the reference library, and should contain a ready-reference collection on open shelves, enabling readers to consult dictionaries, encyclopædias, statistical year-books, compendiums of geography, and other sources of general information as they read. That it should not be separated from the reading room where the periodical magazines and reviews are kept goes without saying. Files of such as are preserved should be close at hand. All this means that the reading room for newspapers will be another expensive department; yet the policy of making it a vital part of the whole library undertaking is in the long run economic. Here, surely, that training for citizenship which so many are preaching may be carried on without the features that make it objectionable to the old-fashioned party man. The existence of public newsrooms where the daily papers are read intelligently and their pronouncements checked and compared, might, in the course of time, react healthily on the daily press itself. As to the lighter class of periodical, the same discretion has to be exercised in shunning the frivolous and worthless as an intelligent and responsible committee, not devoid of a sense of humour, would display in handling fiction. It is high time that the policy of treating this department as a kind of bait for the unregenerate, something to make the library popular, were abandoned. It is a delusive policy, grounded on two false assumptions--the first, that it is our duty to get people to read, no matter what they read; the second, that if you start them reading and bring them into the library they will eventually proceed to higher things. Every librarian knows that the habitual consumer of silly and pernicious reading-matter never can, without some almost miraculous change of mind, be taught to read and enjoy anything else. If you lure him with rubbish, you are encouraging tastes that are a greater obstacle to library progress than absolute illiteracy; you are putting obstacles in the road you propose to take him. The remark of an American librarian about certain popular novelists, that the people who like that sort of thing would be more sensible and better educated had they never learned to read, applies even more forcibly to the besotted victims of our periodicals of the baser sort. But the mere fact that the public who kill time with this sort of chewing-gum are not the public that borrow books or use the reference library, at once disposes of such a plea. By all means, let us have light literature, but let it be literature, and not an unrecognizable imitation.