and more fully every day, thereby adjusting itself to the modern temper of which I have already spoken.  The library and its users are coming more closely together, in sympathy, in aims and in action, than ever before—­partly a result and partly a justification for that Homeric method of popularizing it which has been characterized and condemned as commercial.  The day when the librarian, or the professor, or the clergyman could retire into his tower and hold aloof from the vulgar herd is past.  The logical result of such an attitude is now being worked out on the continent of Europe.  Not civilizations, as some pessimists are lamenting, but the forces antagonistic to civilization are there destroying one another, and there is hope that a purified democracy will arise from the wreckage.  May our American civilization never have to run the gantlet of such a terrible trial!  Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the hope for the future efficiency of all our public institutions, including the library, lies in the success of democracy, and that depends on the existence and improvement of the conditions in whose absence democracy necessarily fails.  Foremost among these is the homogeneity of the population.  The people among whom democracy succeeds must have similar standards, ideas, aims and abilities.  Democracy may exist in a pack of wolves, but not in a group that is half wolves and half men.  Either the wolves will kill the men or the men the wolves.  This is an extreme case, but it is true in general that in a community made up of irreconcilable elements there can be no true democracy.  And the same oneness of vision and purpose that conduces to the success of democracy will also bring to perfection such great democratic institutions as the library, which have already borne such noteworthy fruit among us just because we are homogeneous beyond all other nations on the earth.  And here progress is by action and reaction, as we see it so often in the world.  The unity of aims and abilities that makes democracy and democratic institutions possible is itself facilitated and increased by the work of those institutions.  The more work the library does, the more its ramifications multiply, and the further they extend, the more those conditions are favored that make the continuance of the library possible.  In working for others, it is working for itself, and every additional bit of strength and sanity that it takes on does but enable it to work for others the more.  And if the democracy whose servant it is will but realize that it has grown up as a part of that American system to which we are all committed—­to which we owe all that we are and in which we must place all our hopes for the future—­then neither democracy nor library will have aught to fear.  Democracy will have its “true and laudable” service from the library, and the library in its turn will have adequate sympathy, aid and support from the people.