IT IS amid conditions that call for heroic effort that the public library of today must do its work with children. There are not wanting critics who decry some present-day tendencies. They saw that when librarians seek the children in their homes to form groups of readers, they encroach upon the domain of the settlement worker. They complain that the story hour, now so widely developed, is an invasion of the kindergarten; they view with alarm the use of the stereo-scope and stereopticon as being outside the legitimate domain of the institution. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps they are wrong; maybe they are both right and wrong. If the purposes sought by these means were adequately ministered to from other sources, it may well be questioned whether the library would be justified in adopting these methods. In the admitted lack of agencies to meet these conditions, the children's librarian may find satisfaction in the results obtained, even if some folks' notions of legitimate library work are sadly jolted, as in the time to come they will certainly have to be modified. At best, the library and all allied agencies are struggling against tremendous odds in counteracting subtle influences for evil and open influences that breed coarseness and vulgarity. To operate a moving-picture show within the sacred precincts of a library may be counter to the accepted view of the fitness of things, but those who have visited the children's department of the Cincinnati Public Library will recall with a glow of pleasure the sight of the interested group of children awaiting each his turn at the machine to go on a tarry-at-home journey to Switzerland and France and other countries over-sea. Would the critics prefer to have the children glue their faces to the glass in the vulgar and suggestive shows of the penny arcade? The craving for novelty and amusement will not be denied. The instinct for dramatic action is inherent. It is said that there are 5,000 penny arcades and nickelodeons in New York City alone, with an average daily attendance of 300,000 children, and scarce a hamlet in all this wide country that does not foster one or two of them, a large proportion of them supplied with pictures of doubtful propriety.

The average penny arcade is closely linked with the Sunday comic supplement and the yellow-backed pamphlet in the vulgarization and decadence that threatens to overwhelm the youth of the country. Parents who would be horrified to note in the hands of their children any specimen of dime novel literature, complacently turn over to them on Sunday morning the sheet splashed with daubs of red and yellow and green that serve to render attractive the accompanying pictures and their slangy explanations. The Sunday comic supplement has done more to debase and to brutalize what is fine in boys and girls, to debauch their sense of fairness, to blunt their ideas as to what is manly and fair, to deaden their respect for age and authority, to prevent such aesthetic sense as they may have had, than can be counteracted by all the attempts being made by school, church, museum and library to stimulate a taste for better things. There is no escape from these colored atrocities. Millions enter the households weekly, they are scattered broadcast in parks and on the streets, they are left upon the seats of railway trains and street cars—they are everywhere. Parental effort is powerless. In a few households they are ruthlessly barred, but the neighbors' children are willing to share without demur. In an address before the American Playgrounds Congress, recently held in New York City, Miss Maud Summers uttered a warning against this pernicious fostering of deceit, cunning, and disrespect for age.

"The child of sensible parents will not see or know about them," Mr. Lindsay Swift wrote in a contribution to The Printing Art two years ago, "but the child of the street, the child of the indifferent household, will warm to them like a cat to the back of the stove. There are certain negative results that parents have a right to expect from every educative force which is brought to bear on their children; that these children shall not be deliberately taught disrespect for old age or for physical infirmities and deformities; that they shall not learn to cherish contempt for other races or religions than their own; that they shall not take satisfaction in the tormenting of animals or weaklings—in short, that they shall not acquire an habitually cynical and unsportsmanlike attitude of mind. A morbid gloating over the deficiencies and humiliations of our neighbors is pretty sure to develop vulgarity and a lax moral fibre in ourselves; for vulgarity of mind and manners seems to me to be primarily a lack of restraint in thought, feeling, and expression regarding those tendencies which every civilized man and race is striving to modify or to conquer."

Doubtless, when first this medium for purveying humor was devised, the tendencies now so apparent were minimized. There were, in some of the earlier attempts, real humor and some skill of pencil, but the pictures have degenerated until they cry aloud for suppression.

There need be no apology for the story hour. A good story well told makes for pleasure, makes for morals, makes for intellectual growth. Most librarians defend it on the ground that the telling of the story leads to the reading of books on related topics. To my mind, no such defense or even explanation is needed. The story, if well chosen and fittingly told, justifies the teller and the tale. It is a moot question in educational circles whether the ear is a better medium for receiving impressions than is the eye. Some school-masters aver that there are ear-minded children and there are eye-minded children. A good story, well told, is worthy of being counted in the circulation statistics as many times as there are children to hear it, and far worthier to so figure than many a book that is taken out on a card and leaves as faint and as durable an impression on the reader's mind as footsteps on the shifting sand. And the more the storyteller can lead back the mind of childhood to the heart of childhood, the tales of wonder and of myth that grew to fulness when the race was young, the greater the service and the more fruitful in giving the listener something that will endure.

Neither is there need for apology in the exploitation of home library groups. At best, these can but partially counteract the flood of cheap and decadent literature of the most depraved character that circulates secretly among boys and girls. In Buffalo, recently, the public library has found among the people of foreign birth a mass of material in circulation whose bad quality has surprised even the librarians. The home groups that are being formed in some of the larger cities find an opening wedge among people of foreign birth whose reading has been practically confined to stuff of this sort. The reports from Germany would hardly seem credible were they not vouched for by the Durer Union, whose campaign against the growing tendency to read trashy literature has unearthed these facts. In a statement issued by its secretary, the astounding declaration is made that 8,000 established booksellers and 30,000 peddlers were engaged in selling sensational serials and books containing complete tales of a very low order.

No fewer than 750,000 of these wretched stories have been sold in the course of a single year. They are hawked from house to house, from factory to factory, outside schools, and among the peasants on every farm throughout the empire. The peddlers nearly always enter by the back door or the kitchen stairs. Servant girls and ignorant peasantry are the most fruitful customers, but it is asserted by municipal officials that even people who are in receipt of poor relief often deprive themselves of necessities in order to save two cents for a vile rehash of the sensationally embellished details of a notorious crime.

The extent of the literature of the streets obtainable in this country is little appreciated. An investigation, instituted several years ago by the Library Commission of one of the Middle West states, demonstrated the existence of tons of it on the upper and back-row shelves of news stands in all the larger cities, and in many of the villages and hamlets as well.

The desire to show a large circulation has made many librarians yield to the tyranny of statistics, and some errors of library administration are attributable to this cause. While it is undoubtedly true that the chief function of the library is to distribute as many wholesome books as possible, among the people, the totals of circulation are of vastly inferior importance to some facts that are not susceptible of being arranged in statistical uniform. And this is more particularly true of children's reading. It is less a question of how many books are read than what books are read and by whom they are read. It may well be urged that there is greater importance in the quality of the circulation than in the size of it—not how many, but how good, should be the earnest inquiry. It may well be doubted whether some children do not read more books than they can well assimilate. They are mentally profited about as much as their physical condition is nourished when they quaff quantities of soda water. They become troubled with mental dyspepsia.

Another criticism that is pertinent applies to book selection. There are too many books written especially for children. There are more titles in the average collection of children's books than the librarian ought to purchase. There are too many books that are negative in quality—pleasantly enough flavored, not harmful in tone, authentic as to facts, but colorless. There are usually too few of the world's enduring books—classics—and too many editions edited especially for children. Some of the children's catalogues are of appalling size. Here there is abundant need of excision. Five hundred titles, judiciously chosen and plentifully duplicated, would meet the need of most libraries, and would immeasurably raise the standard of reading. Much might be ascertained by an analysis of the individual cards of juvenile patrons—a sort of laboratory experiment.

There is need for greater co-operation between teachers and librarians. There are tendencies in teaching that are strangling rather than imparting the love of fine literature. It is no longer sufficient to give to the reader the music of lyric, the stir of epic—poetry must serve as an exercise in grammar. It is not sufficient that from virile prose the reader may obtain the glow of the writer's fancy or thought—it must do duty as a bit of sentence construction, or a companion piece to a lesson in geography or, perhaps, of history. We are told that poetry is dead. Who killed it? and how long would it take to do the like for prose?

Whatever of criticism as to plan and method may be rightfully made against public library work with children, the earnestness that underlies it all will, in the end, serve to eliminate the real causes for such criticism. Its meaning will unfold as time goes on—the first children's room opened in a public library dates back not much more than a dozen years. In the almonry of Westminster, three and one-half centuries ago, William Caxton chose carefully for his printing press, with deep reverence in his heart for the white souls upon which his characters would be printed as surely as upon the white paper before him. And with that same thought and care will be sifted, in the work that is being carried on now, the printed page that helps to mould and build the character of the newer generations.