I have said that all we can offer is opportunity; to change our figure, we can furnish the drinking-fountain—­thirst must bring the horse to it.  But we must not forget that we offer our opportunity in vain unless we are sure that everyone who might grasp it realizes our offer and what it means.

Here is the chance for personal endeavor.  If the young people in a neighborhood continue to hold their social meetings over a saloon when the branch library or the school is perfectly willing to offer its assembly room, it is pretty certain that they do not understand that offer, or that they mistrust its sincerity, or that there is something wrong that might be remedied by personal effort.  In the one of our branches that is most used by organizations there is this personal touch.  But I should hesitate to say that the others do not have it too.  There are plenty of organizations near this busiest library and there are no other good places for them to meet.  In the neighborhood of some other branches there are other meeting-places, and elsewhere, perhaps, the social instinct is not so strong, or at any rate the effort to organize is lacking.  Should the librarian step out and attempt to stimulate this social instinct and to guide this organizing effort?  There is room for difference of opinion here.

Personally I think that he should not do it directly and officially as a librarian.  He may do it quietly and unobtrusively like any other private citizen, but he needs all his efforts, all his influence, to bring the book and the reader together in his community.  Sometimes by doing this he can be doing the other too, and he can always do it vicariously.  He should bear in mind that the successful man is not he who does everything himself, but he who can induce others to do things—­to do them in his way and to direct them toward his ends.  Even in the most sluggish, the most indifferent community there are these potential workers with enthusiasms that need only to be awakened to be let loose for good.  The magic key is often in the librarian’s girdle, and his free offer of house room and sympathy, with good literature thrown in, will always be of powerful assistance in this kind of effort.  He will seldom need to do more than to make clear the existence and the nature of the opportunity that he offers.  I know that there are some librarians and many more teachers who hesitate to open their doors in any such way as this; who are afraid that the opportunities offered will be misused or that the activities so sheltered will be misjudged by the public.  It has shocked some persons that a young people’s dancing-class has been held, under irreproachable auspices, in one of our branch libraries; others have been grieved to see that political ward meetings have taken place in them, and that some rather radical political theories have been debated there.  These persons forget that a library never takes sides.  It places on its shelves books on the Civil War from the standpoint of both North and South, histories of the great religious controversies by both Catholics and Protestants, ideas and theories in science and philosophy from all sides and at all angles.  It may give room at one time to a young people’s dancing-class and at another to a meeting of persons who condemn dancing.  Its walls may echo one day to the praises of our tariff system and on another to fierce denunciations of it.