The fact that the first step toward accomplishment is to create an interest has long been recognised, but attempts have been made too often to do it by devious ways, unrelated to the matter in hand.  Students have been made to study history or algebra by offering prizes to the diligent and by threatening the slothful with punishment.  More indirect rewards and punishments abound in all our incitements to effort and need not be mentioned here.  They may often be effective, but the further removed they are from direct personal interest in the subject, the weaker and the less permanent is the result.  You may offer a boy a dollar to learn certain facts in English history, but those facts will not be fixed so well or so lastingly in his mind as those connected with his last year’s trip to California, which he remembers easily without offer of reward or threat of punishment.

The interest in the facts gathered by reading in connection with the average club paper is merely the result of a desire to remain in good standing by fulfilling the duties of membership; and these duties may be fulfilled with slight effort and no direct interest, as we have already seen.

If interest were present even at the inception of the programme, something would be gained; but in too many cases it is not.  The programme committee must make some kind of a programme, but what it is to be they know little and care less.

Two women recently entered a branch library and asked the librarian, who was busy charging books at the desk, what two American dramatists she considered “foremost.”  This was followed by the request, “Please tell me the two best plays of each of them.”  A few minutes later the querists returned and asked the same question about English dramatists, and still later about German, Russian, Italian and Spanish writers of the drama.  Each time they eagerly wrote down the information and then retired to the reading-room for a few minutes’ consultation.

Finally they propounded a question that was beyond the librarian’s knowledge, and then she asked why they wanted to know.

“We are making out the programme for our next year’s study course in the Blank Club,” was the answer.

“But you mustn’t take my opinion as final,” protested the scandalised librarian.  “You ought to read up everything you can find about dramatists.  I may have left out the most important ones.”

“This will do nicely,” said the club-woman, as she folded her sheets of paper.  And it did—­whether nicely or not deponent saith not? but it certainly constituted the club programme.

On another occasion a clubwoman entered the library and said with an air of importance, “I want your material on Susanna H. Brown.”

The librarian had never heard of Susanna, but experience had taught her modesty and also a certain degree of guile, so she merely said, “What do you want to know about her, particularly?”