will not say in his turn: "I would not like to name a book which I could confidently say might not, sooner or later, be asked for, and be useful to some searcher after knowledge". I do not think that Lord Rosebery, with all his wide public experience and many-sided knowledge, can ever have served on a Public Library Committee. I would suggest to our Edinburgh friends that they should co-opt him without delay. I feel sure that after a few months' experience in that office he would no longer feel the "hideous depression" of which he spoke at Glasgow, as he gazed around on what seemed to him "a huge cemetery of dead books". He would find that though their animation might be for the moment suspended, their potential life was strong within them. Only the other day our Chief Librarian, Mr. Shaw, to make the best use of his space, put away on his least accessible shelf some old and out-of-date volumes of the "Almanach de Gotha," which no one in the library could remember having been asked for. They had not been there a week when they all had to be brought down, to enable the writer of an article on European history to verify some of his refer ences. So I would say to the Committee-man and to the librarian, be guided, as you often must be, by considerations of cost, of space, of expediency; but be very careful how you narrow down your outlook by saying, "This is a book which the public will never want". If you wish your library to be of the greatest benefit to the greatest number, put on its shelves all the books you can possibly afford, and throw those shelves open to the public to the fullest possible extent. That last is a very modern, and to some, still a very dangerous doctrine. They would rather applaud the provision attached to the gift by an old Liverpool sea captain in 1715, when he left £30 to found a Theological Library at St. Peter's Church, Liverpool. The books when purchased were to be chained to the shelves. What a long step it is from that state of things to the open-access libraries, of which so far we have two in Liverpool, where any reader is trusted to take down from the shelves any book he likes, and where, as a result, only one in every twenty-five thousand books handled in the past year has been reported as missing; and some of those are probably only mislaid. Depend upon it, if you trust the public, and let them understand that you are trusting them, you will not be disappointed. Let me refer very briefly to another criticism passed upon public libraries, and I do so because it is often heard in Liverpool. It is said that the libraries exist to provide light and frivolous literature, works of fiction, for people who ought to have some better employment for their time. For you that criticism, so often advanced and so often demolished, has no weight, and, therefore, in referring to it I am rather addressing those outside this hall, with the force of your approval behind me, in the hope that we may once for all convince them of the fallacy of their arguments. Only a few days ago I read an article in a leading English newspaper, copied, apparently with approval, from an American publication, every line of which betrayed the prejudiced ignorance of the writer. After apparently lumping together all fiction, the whole world of imaginative literature, as "a mass of rubbish," he describes the chief occupation of public libraries to be the emptying of this " trashy fiction," as he calls it, on the heads of the people. He then kindly proceeds to define for our instruction the real province of the public library, and this is fortunate, for it enables us to properly appreciate his mental standpoint. "The public library," he says, "should contain standard works of all sorts, but should be chary about circulating its treasures." I cannot believe that is the creed of the American librarian. The members of this Association will certainly not subscribe to it. It is not, I think, creditable to English journalism that a leading paper should, under the sensational heading of "The Library Mania," give a prominent place to what may, in the writer's own apt phrase, he described as "a mass of rubbish ". In any case, the proportion of fiction taken out by readers is steadily diminishing. Last year, in our Liverpool readingrooms, the prose fiction asked for was only 37 per cent of the whole issues, as against 63 per cent in other classes. There was a larger proportion issued for home reading, it is true, but even that is decreasing. If it were not, I for one should not be disturbed. Look at some of the other municipal institutions which this city, like many others, provides for the people. Botanic Gardens, Museums, Art Galleries, Aquaria, Parks, Boating Lakes, Bowling Greens, Golf Links. Do not the great majority of those who visit them avowedly do so only for amusement and recreation? For the same reason they read works of fiction, and get from them quite as much refreshment and perhaps even more inspiration. In this the public library is only taking its proper part in the whole scheme of civic life. A city hall, on noble architectural lines; a public gallery, full of the masterpieces of famous painters and sculptors; a school of art, teaching from high ideals; a street garden bright with flowers; the music of a municipal orchestra; a great library, treasuring on its shelves the aspirations and ideas of the thinkers of the present and the past; all these are the forces to which the community confidently looks to uphold the cause of righteousness, and peace, and purity, amid the turmoil and the strife, the industrial unrest, the individual selfishness, of this present time. And among them all the public library must hold a foremost place. We need not deliberate nowadays upon the building and equipment of our libraries. That is all done. What we have to do now is to extend their use by the people, to let them know what we have to give them, and to make it easy for them to get at it. The student and the scholar know us already. Beyond taking care that we have what they want when they come, we need not concern ourselves much about them. It is to those who will not come of their own accord that we have to go out and compel them to come in. The libraries are theirs, and for their own sakes and ours they must be taught to use them. The generation to which we belong will be known as that which built up public libraries. Let us hope that succeeding generations may say of us "They builded even better than they knew". THE PLACE OF BIBLIOGRAPHY IN EDUCATION. BY HENRY R. TEDDER, SECRETARY AND LIBRARIAN, MA ANY years ago I had the privilege of listening to a great oration of the late John Bright. It was at the opening of the Birmingham Free Libraries, after the great fire. He said that on the subject of libraries, as on that of education, perhaps everything that could be told had been said, and then proceeded to discourse upon education, books, and libraries, in the noble and inspiring language such as he well knew how to employ on great public occasions. It is true that much has been talked and written about education, and to a less extent, much about bibliography, but there still remains something to be said on the connexion between the two, and more particularly as to their relations from the point of view of the librarian. I cannot attempt to vie in speech or in thought with John Bright, nor do I profess to be sufficiently acquainted with the technicalities of educational methods to suggest how the study of bibliography should be introduced into the schedule of studies at various standards. My object is to show the necessity of bibliography, the wide field comprised by that study, how the knowledge cannot be acquired from textbooks, how one of its chief practical aims is to teach in what ways books and libraries can be best utilized, how it is a practical study only to be taught by workshop methods, and how it should become part of the school training at every stage. What is Education ? We are told that education should be a training of the young for adult life; that it should prepare men and women to 'Read at the Liverpool Meeting of the Library Association, 3 September, take their places in the world. Yet we hear complaints on all sides from business people that youths come to them from school full of useless information imperfectly assimilated, and without the faculty of putting their acquired knowledge to practical effect. Where is the fault? Is it that too many subjects are taught in schools and few effectually? Is it that methods are wrong? To neither of these questions am I capable of giving an adequate reply, nor indeed am I prepared to support the wholesale and perhaps unjust accusation suggested above. I merely wish to carry a little further the suggestions submitted at a Conference of library and educational authorities convened by the Library Association at Birmingham in May, 1906, and to present a side of educational development which I think deserves consideration. That new paths open out and that new methods are required in education from time to time are facts recognized by a distinguished writer on educational theories, Prof. James Welton ("Encyclopædia Britannica," Vol. VIII, 1910), who says: "It is in these latter times that the actual work of education is apt to lose touch with the culture of the community. For schools and universities which are the ordinary channels. through which adult culture reaches the young are naturally conservative and bound by tradition. They are slow to leave the old paths which have hitherto led to the desired goal, and to enter on new and untried ways." We are told by another authority that "We inherit two distinct educational traditions, the scholastic tradition of the grammar school and the apprenticeship tradition of the workshop" (Sir H. Ll. Smith, "Studies in Secondary Education," 1892, p. 2). In both of these traditions education is identified with instruction, with the acquisition of learning or of skill. Long ago Pestalozzi asserted that "Words cannot give us a knowledge of things; they are only useful for giving expression to what we have in our minds". He accordingly wished "to connect study with manual labour, the school with the workshop". My contention is that the public library with its rich store |