The secret of success is to bring out the child’s own initiative. This, it may be taken for granted, is not a tendency to original sin. Good taste, like good art, is at bottom a natural thing: a misguided belief that it must be painfully instilled has done more than aught else to pervert it. Children perceive as much instinctively; hence their suspicion of well-meant efforts to put them on the right paths. A boy will hate even _Robinson Crusoe_ if he is told he must read it; rather let him discover the realms of gold for himself. All which means that children want handling in matters of taste with a refined skill to which the mere common sense and tact required by the adult reader in a library is nothing. It means, again, that though the children’s librarian is sometimes born, when he, or rather she, has to be made, the making is an important and highly specialized process. Other obvious points must be borne in mind, by teachers, parents, and librarians. The mere posture in reading, and the need for a good light at the proper angle, are not minor points, for bad habits in this respect are ruinous and alarmingly common. Many children read far too much. They must not be allowed to become bookworms; the parent ought to see that they have a healthy outdoor life, and the teacher that the charms of the book-world do not lead to the neglect of tasks set at school. Steady co-operation with the teachers in leading children to find in books aids to the business and the pleasures of life, is characteristic of those library systems where the children’s department has been given its due place in the scheme, and is not a mere side-show, ignorantly mismanaged and not thought worth spending money on. It is characteristic, for instance, of the admirable group of children’s libraries and reading rooms in the Islington Public Libraries, with its stock of 10,000 volumes set aside for the junior clients. There are numerous others in London and the provinces where co-operation is carried on in some form or another; but differences of opinion on the comparative merits of school libraries and of the library in the children’s reading room make for differences of method. Yet access to a school library does not render the public library any the less valuable to an intelligent child; and there ought to be the fullest mutual understanding and the keenest desire to help each other between librarian and teacher.