Some of the obstacles to the immediate realization of our plans in full may be briefly stated as follows: 

(1) Lack of sufficient funds.  With more money we could buy more books, pay higher salaries, and employ more persons.  The assistants in charge of children’s rooms should be women of the highest culture and ability, and it is difficult to secure proper persons at our present salaries.  Assistants in charge of school work must be persons of tact and quickness of perception, and they should have no other work to do; whereas at present we are obliged to give this work to library assistants in addition to their ordinary routine duties, to avoid increasing our staff by about forty assistants, which our appropriation does not permit.

(2) Misunderstanding on the part of the public, and also to some extent on the part of teachers, of our aims, ability, and attitude.  This I am glad to say is continually lessening.  We can scarcely expect that each of our five hundred assistants should be thoroly imbued with the spirit of helpfulness toward the schools or even that they should perfectly understand what we desire and aim to do.  Nor can we expect that our wish to aid should be appreciated by every one of fifty thousand teachers or a million parents.  This will come in time.

(3) A low standard of honesty on the part of certain users of the library.  It is somewhat disheartening to those who are laboring to do a public service to find that some of those whom they are striving to benefit, look upon them merely as easy game.  To prevent this and at the same time to withstand those who urge that such misuse of the library should be met by the withdrawal of present privileges and facilities uses up energy that might otherwise be directed toward the improvement of our service.  Now, like the intoxicated man, we sometimes refuse invitations to advance because it is “all we can do to stay where we are.”  Here is an opportunity for all the selective influences that we may bring to bear, and unfortunately the library can have but little part in these.

Have I wandered too far from my theme?  The good that a public library may do, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may assume in a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which it is administered and the resources at its disposal.  Its public services may be various, but probably there is no place in which it may be of more value than side by side with the public school; and I venture to think that this is the case largely because education to be complete must select as well as train, must compel the fit to step forward and the unfit to retire, and must do this, not only at the outset of a course of training but continuously thruout its duration.  We speak of a student being “put thru the mill,” and we must not forget that a mill not only grinds and stamps into shape but also sifts and selects.  A finished product of a given