must supply what is lacking if we are to arouse a desire for books in those who do not yet possess it.  I say that such a labor is difficult enough to interest him whose pleasure it is to essay hard tasks; it is noble enough to attract him who loves his fellow-man; success in it is rare enough and glorious enough to stimulate him who likes to succeed where others have failed.  Advertising may be good or bad, noble or ignoble, right or wrong, according to what is advertised and our methods of advertising it.  He who would scorn to announce the curative powers of bottled spring-water and pink aniline dye; he who regards it as a commonplace task to urge upon the spendthrift public the purchase of unnecessary gloves and neckties, may well feel a thrill of satisfaction and of anticipation in the task of advertising ideas and of persuading the unheeding citizen to appropriate what he has been accustomed to view with indifference.

To get at the root of the matter, let us inquire why it is that so many persons do not care for books.  We may divide them, I think, into two classes—­those who do not care, or appear not to care for ideas at all, whether stored in books or not; and those who do care for ideas but who either do not easily get them out of storage or do not realize that they can be and are stored in books.  Absolute carelessness of ideas is, it seems to me, rather apparent than real.  It exists only in the idiot.  There are those to be sure that care about a very limited range of ideas; but about some ideas they always care.

We must, in our advertisement of ideas, bear this in mind—­the necessity of offering to each that which he considers it worth his while to take.  If I were asked what is the most fundamentally interesting subject to all classes, I should unhesitatingly reply “philosophy.”  Not, perhaps, the philosophy of the schools, but the individual philosophy that every man and woman has, and that is precisely alike in no two of us.  I have heard a tiny boy, looking up suddenly from his play, ask “Why do we live?” This and its correlative “Why do we die?” Whence come we and whither do we go?  What is the universe and what are our relations to it—­these questions in some form have occurred to everyone who thinks at all.  They are discussed around the stove at the corner grocery, in the logging camp, on the ranch, in clubs and at boarding-house tables.  Sometimes they take a theological turn—­free will, the origin and purpose of evil, and so on.  I do not purpose to give here a catalogue of the things in which an ordinary man is interested, and I have said this only to remind you that his interest may be vivid even in connection with subjects usually considered abstruse.  This interest in ideas we may call the library’s raw material; anything that tends to create it, to broaden it, to extend it to new fields and to direct it into paths that are worth while is making it possible for the library to do better and wider work—­is helping on its campaign of