It is this complete idea of a library that still fails of development in the minds of these men, an idea that the library is a live thing, a public utility of which they will naturally and inevitably avail themselves as they do of the street-cars to take them both to and away from their work. Nothing is needed to convince men that a utility =is= a utility save the satisfying use of it. When they have found that the library speeds them on in the direction of the day's occupation, then it becomes easy enough for them to learn that the library can also get them far removed from it. And when the workingman fully comprehends the =working= library, and by means of it is introduced to the =diverting= library, he becomes a man with the greatest capacity for usefulness, and the library's conquest of the community is finished and triumphant.
The PRESIDENT: Mr. Stevens has very forcefully brought out the factor that a book may be in bringing into life dormant faculties that might otherwise go to waste and recalls to us the remark of Prof. Dewey, that the loss of the unearned increment is as nothing compared with the loss of the undiscovered resource.
Of course you know as well as the members of the program committee that they had nothing to do with the selection of the next speaker; the topic chose her. How could anyone else be asked to present the subject of "The woman on the farm," than Miss LUTIE E. STEARNS, of the Wisconsin free library commission?
Modern programs of library extension through public libraries as distinguished from traveling library systems are practically confined to an arbitrary line drawn tightly around the city's limits. Charters, laws, or ordinances under which many libraries operate are usually interpreted to restrict the use of such institutions to a narrow area and no great attempt has been made through legislation, save in California and a few isolated examples elsewhere, to extend library privileges to adjacent communities. It is a happy omen for the future that the president of the American Library Association, the custodian of a library catering to two-million city dwellers with a circulation second in rank to Greater New York, should have seen fit on his own initiative to place among the topics of this meeting the needs of the woman on the farm, the real founder of the city's citizenship.
