This making the whole outstanding supply of circulating books an agency in our publicity scheme for ideas is evidently more effective as the books better fit and satisfy their users; for in that case we have an unpaid agent with each book.  The adaptation of book to user helps our advertisement of ideas, and that in turn aids us in adapting book to user.  When a dynamo starts, the newly arisen current makes the field stronger and that in turn increases the current.  Only here we must have just a little residual magnetism in the field magnet to start the whole process.  In the library’s work the residual magnetism is represented by the latent interest in ideas that is present in every community.  And I can do no better, in closing, than to emphasize the fact that everything that advertises ideas, even if totally unconnected with their recorded form in books, helps the library and pushes forward its work.

Itself a product of the great extension of intellectual activity to classes in which it was formerly bounded by narrow limits, the library is bound to widen those limits wherever they can be stretched, and every movement of them reacts to help it.  Surely advertisement on its part is an evangel—­a bearing of good intellectual tidings into the darkness.  We are spiritualistic mediums in the best sense—­the bearers of authentic messages from all the good and great of past or present time; only with us, no turning on of the light, no publicity however glaring, will break the spell or do otherwise than aid, for whether we succeed or fail, whether we live or die, those messages, recorded as they are in books, will stand while humanity remains.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, AND THE SOCIAL CENTER MOVEMENT[7]

    [7] Read before the National Education Association.

The center of a geometrical figure is important, not for its size and content, but for its position—­not for what it is in itself, but for its relations to the other elements of the figure.  And words used with derived meanings are used best when their original significations are kept in mind.  The business center of a city does not contain all of that city’s commercial activity; when we speak of the church as a religious center, we do not mean that there is to be no religious activity in the home or in other walks of life; as for the center of population of a large and populous country, it may be out in the prairie where neither man nor his dwellings are to be seen.  All these centers are what they are because of certain relationships.  It is so with a social center.  But social relationships cover a wide field.  The relationships of business, of religion, even of mere co-existence, are all social.  May we have a center for so wide a range of activities?  Even the narrower relations of business or of religion tend to form subsidiary groups and to multiply subsidiary centers.  In a large city we may have not only a general business center but centers of the real estate business, of the hardware or textile trades, and so on.  Our religious affiliations condense into denominational centers.