Years ago, at a branch library in a distant city, a reader stood at the counter and complained loudly because the library would not send her a postal reserve notice unless she defrayed the cost, which was one cent.  The assistant to whom she was talking had no option in the matter and was merely enforcing a rule common, so far as I know, to all American public libraries; but she had to bear the brunt of the reader’s displeasure, which she did meekly, as it was all in the day’s work.  The time occupied in this useless business spelled delay to half a dozen other readers, who were waiting their turn.  Finally, one of them, a quiet little old lady in black, spoke up as follows:  “Some of us hereabouts think that we owe a great debt of gratitude to this library.  Its assistants have rendered service to us that we can never repay.  I am glad to have an opportunity to do something in return, and it therefore gives me pleasure to pay the cent about which you are taking up this young lady’s time, and ours.”  So saying, she laid the coin on the desk and the line moved on.  I have always remembered these two points of view as typical of two kinds of library users.  Their respective effects on the temper and work of a library staff need, I am sure, no explanation.

In what I have said, which is such a small fraction of what might be said, that I am almost ashamed to offer it to you, I have in truth only been playing the variations on one tune, which is—­Draw closer to the library, as it is trying to draw closer to you.  There is no such thing, physicists tell us, as a one-sided force.  Every force is but one aspect of a stress, which includes also an equal and opposing force.  Any two interacting things in this world are either approaching each other or receding from each other.  So it should be with library and public.  A forward movement on the one hand should necessarily involve one to meet it.

The peculiarity of our modern temper is our hunger for facts—­our confidence that when the facts are known we shall find a way to deal with them, and that until the facts are known we shall not be able to act—­not even to think.  Our ancestors thought and acted sometimes on premises that seem to us frightfully flimsy—­they tried, as Dean Swift painted them in his immortal satire, to get sunbeams from cucumbers.  There are some sunbeam-chasers among us to-day, but even they recognize the need of real cucumbers to start with; the imaginary kind will not do.  I recently heard a great teacher of medicine say that the task of the modern physician is merely to ascertain the facts on which the intelligent public is to act.  How different that sounds from the dicta of the medicine of a past generation!  It is the same everywhere:  we are demanding an accurate survey—­an ascertainment of the facts in any field in which action, based on inference and judgment, is seen to be necessary.  Now the library is nothing more nor less than a storehouse of recorded facts.  It is becoming so more truly