We need not think, however, that there is anything new in the method of distribution by personal travel.  Homer employed it when he wished his heroic verse to reach the great body of his countrymen.  By personal travel he took it to the cross-roads—­just as the distributor of food and clothing and labor-saving appliances does to-day; just as we librarians must do if we are to democratize all literature as Homer democratized a small part of it.  Homer, if you choose to say so, adopted the “commercial-traveler theory” of literary distribution; but I prefer to say that the modern public library, in laying stress on the necessity of distributing its treasures and in adopting the measures that have proved effective in other fields, is working on the Homeric method.

Now, without the people to whom he distributed his wares, Homer would have been dead long ago.  He lives because he took his wares to his audience.  And without its public, as we have already said, the public library, too, would soon pass into oblivion.  It must look to the public for the breath of life, for the very blood in its veins, for its bone and sinew.  What, then, is the part that the community may play in increasing the efficiency of a public institution like the public library?  Such an institution is, first of all, a medium through which the community does something for itself.  The community employs and supports it, and at the same time is served by it.  To use another homely illustration, which I am sure will not please those who object to comparing great things with small, this type of relationship is precisely what we find in domestic service.  A cook or a housemaid has a dual relation to the mistress of the house, who is at the same time her employer and the person that she directly serves.  This sort of relation does not obtain, for instance, in the case of a railroad employe, who is responsible to one set of persons and serves another.  The public library is established and maintained by a given community in order that it may perform certain service for that same community directly.  It seems to me that this dual relationship ought to make for efficiency.  If it does not, it is because its existence and significance are not always realized.  The cook knows that if she does not cook to suit her mistress she will lose her job—­the thing works almost automatically.  If the railroad employe does not serve the public satisfactorily there is no such immediate reaction, although I do not deny that the public displeasure may ultimately reach the railroad authorities and through them the employe.  In most public institutions the reaction is necessarily somewhat indirect.  The post office is a public institution, but public opinion must act on it generally through the channels of Congressional legislation, which takes time.  Owing to this fact, very few postmen, for instance, realize that the persons to whom they deliver letters are also their employers.  In all libraries the