Discipline, of course, must be maintained; this is essential to smooth working; but it must be evoked rather than imposed. Only the right sort of person, having had the right sort of training, even if born with the right disposition, is competent to evoke it and at the same time keep the children friendly, happy, and occupied with interesting things. Scores of children’s reading rooms have been a failure from the lack of this well-qualified superintendent. It is a waste of time to try running them as a minor department, to be committed to the hands of each junior assistant as his turn comes on the time-sheet. A mob of youngsters idling their time away and making the pleasant place a bear-garden would be the certain result. One common mistake that has a bad initial effect is to make the junior readers enter the library at a separate door, usually guarded by a special custodian who is a martinet. This preliminary insult to a child’s dignity is, perhaps unconsciously, resented; it strikes a wrong note. The idea that he or she must be segregated from grown-up readers subtly provokes a spirit precisely the opposite of that which needs to be cultivated. It is more fatal than the contrary mistake of pampering and idolizing children. Put him or her on nearly the same footing as their elders; mutual deference is infinitely better than the eighteenth century doctrine that every child is either a limb of Satan or a little imbecile. To attain full success, librarian, teacher, and parents must learn to co-operate. Few parents take any interest in what their children read, and those few often take too much; they do not understand that coercion, or even a too didactic purpose, is fatal to the true object of an apprenticeship to reading, and will assuredly not lead children to love and enjoy reading, or to discover for themselves the values it can give to their own interests and pleasures. Until parents in general are capable of taking a wise interest, it is better perhaps that they should remain as indifferent as most parents are. In the fulness of time, when our children’s rooms are less markedly inferior to those across the Atlantic, when each has an adequate staff of persons trained for this highly specialized work, and teachers understand how much can be done by suggestion to direct the child’s reading and so lighten their own labours in teaching, by then the parent will doubtless have learned to take a proper share of interest and responsibility. All this cannot be achieved in one generation. We have now had public libraries for three-quarters of a century; but, for the arrears of intelligent use we have to make up, we might have only just begun experimenting with them.