Dr. VINCENT said, in opening his address, that he brought the greetings of the National Education Association, being an "uninstructed delegate," and he firmly believed "that with your tact, with your boundless energy, with your irresistible enthusiasm, you will ultimately sweep away into the vortex of your aggressive enterprise even the school teachers of the United States and Canada."

Continuing Dr. Vincent said:

I find some difficulty in deciding just what analogy I shall use this evening. This is a subject which has exhausted almost all the forms of metaphor, simile and analogy. Librarians have been likened to almost everything under the sun. There are three metaphors which have survived from the old days. You are all familiar with these. You use them ironically, to describe that condition of affairs which prevailed in libraries before you supplanted those archaic people who used so thoroughly to misinterpret the functions of the librarian.

One is the analogy of the museum, the library as a museum of books, a museum carefully guarded, a museum to which the public is not to be admitted except under conditions which make resort to the place so irksome that only a few persist. You remember the old story of the man in Philadelphia who had committed a crime. To escape detection and go where nobody would look for him, he resorted to the reading room of the Philadelphia library.

Then there is the other analogy—I do not know that this has been, so far, insisted upon, but it is a very good one, it seems to me—the analogy of the penitentiary of books, with the librarian as a jailer. Just why these people should have been put in prison as they were in the old days, just why their friends should not be permitted to visit them, it is hard to say. This is akin to another analogy, the library as a mausoleum of books, a place where books are buried, and the librarian is a bibliotaph.

These old analogies, these figures of another day, serve pleasantly to flatter a little your complacency over things as they are. But we have no time to devote to the dead past. Let us consider some of the analogies which are still living. I have been a little bewildered by that analogy this morning, the maple leaf and the gavel. I have not been quite able to work it out. It seems to me, with all deference to the delightfully poetic figure, which took everybody by storm, including myself, it is a mistake to try to analyze these sentiments. There was something about preserving the light in the maple leaves and the leaves of the book. Now, as a matter of fact, leaves are put away in a library very much as they are in an herbarium. There is no botanical relation to the trunk of a tree after they have been folded and put away. So I don't see how that works out—but that doesn't make any difference. An analogy never goes on four legs. This one just happened to have about two and a half feet upon the ground. But that is Mrs. Elmendorf's analogy; I propose to leave it alone. There may be an explosive possibility about it which she will explain some time when she has a chance to work it out. She had very short notice and she did it beautifully, and I know so little about botany that it gave me practically no intellectual difficulty.

Then there is the analogy that we are all very fond of, the analogy of the library as a department store. There you have your efficient business manager. The library is a place where it is no trouble to show goods, where you have your various departments and the goods are up to date; where you have all sorts of advertising methods, where you advertise in the daily papers, send out bulletins, get up circulars and posters and attract attention by illustrations, where you have an elevator and all that sort of thing. Just think of the sacrifice that librarians are making, the mere pittances they are receiving, when they might be running these great emporia in our large cities. The department store offers a good analogy if you do not press it too far. There is not very much money in the business. It doesn't pay very well in dollars and cents, but think of the intellectual advantages it offers, the psychic dividends that a business of that sort pays!

Then there is a figure I worked out myself a while ago, the library as a social memory. That seems to me capital. I think, so far as I know, I have a copyright on that figure. It was a good address, by the way, in which I used this trope. I wish I had remembered it; I should have brought it along and read it to-night instead of making this carefully set address. Yes, the social memory idea is a good analogy. It reduces the librarian to a medulla oblongata, so far as I am able to understand the psychology of the situation. Yet that is an honorable function, although largely automatic. It is a good thing to control the resources of the social memory, to be able to put these at the service of the public mind—decidedly a fruitful analogy, but I do not care to elaborate it this evening.

Another figure is an hydraulic image—the library as a reservoir—a reservoir of the world's refreshing, stimulating, energizing, fructifying influences. The librarian becomes a gate keeper and an irrigator. It is a beautiful thought, that you are letting out these fertilizing floods over the plains of human ignorance and stupidity. No wonder you think well of yourselves.

Then there is another that appealed to me this morning—you are a center of radioactivity, of intellectual and moral radioactivity, you are social and psychological physicists. The library as a center of psychic radioactivity strikes me as something satisfying, fascinating, delightful.

Another figure has appealed to my imagination. It is the library as an inn of books. Had you thought about that? Of course, you had—and that makes you hotel keepers. You see, being hotel keepers you would naturally be interested in all kinds of equipment; you would have the rooms prepared for your guests in the very best way, you would have a fireproof hotel, the rooms rather narrow, if you please, but plenty large enough and fairly well lighted and ventilated. The trouble is when you are running a big hotel to have the register carefully kept. You know, almost none of our best hotels can ever tell you whether a man is in or out. They are always uncertain about it, and in the old days before libraries and hotels became so efficient you could never be sure the clerk knew his business. You have changed all that, you are the most competent of hotel keepers and know how to build hotels and equip them. You furnish lobbies and parlors in which to meet guests, or if one likes he may take them home with him. I wish I had time to elaborate this idea of the Inn of Books. I am getting fond of it as the imagination plays with it. You can fancy Socrates coming in, looking about cautiously, with a certain apprehension, a little nervous for fear that she might be there. You can imagine him hanging about the corridors, listening to the gentlemen as they talk, coming up behind them, listening a little while, then saying in that calm way of his, that dangerously calm way, "I beg your pardon, but just what do you mean by 'progressive?' Precisely what significance do you give to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?'" Oh, it would be dreadful if Socrates were to come around and ask what we meant by the things we say. No wonder they gave him the hemlock cup. You couldn't permit him in your hotel. People would not understand him and would not associate with him in these days when we so much resent being asked to analyze and explain our automatic phrases.

You can see Horace coming in. He wouldn't be at all anxious to avoid the ladies. He would soon catch sight of the pretty stenographer. What pleasure he would take in dictating to her a clever ode. Yes, Horace would like the modern hotel. Then picture Pepys coming in, registering and then buying a yellow journal. How dismayed he would be! Pepys would have no chance whatever with Mr. Hearst. Then you can see the entrance of Lord Bacon. He would reveal his dual character, insist upon having the state suite all to himself, then hasten to discover how the electric lights and the elevator worked. You can image this sort of thing and can draw from it any analogy you please, but I have not time to do more than merely suggest it. It would make an admirable address for somebody who will be invited to address you next year.

I am not going to talk about these analogies, I am going to talk on the psychology of pictures. You know these are psychological days. We have now the psychology of almost everything. We have the psychology of infancy, the psychology of childhood, the psychology of adolescence and the psychology of senility; we have the psychology of advertising, we have the psychology of salesmanship—and we have Henry James. Therefore one need make no apology—in fact, one would apologise for not talking upon a psychological theme. I am going to try to see whether psychology has anything to say to librarians. Of course, it must have something to say. You are all psychologists. Anybody that knows how to give some one a book he does not want and make him think he likes it, is a psychologist. It is perfectly obvious that a psychological theme will be appropriate for a company like this.

When we try to describe what is going on in our minds we are immediately forced to use some sort of imagery, ideas made familiar in some other field. So when anybody reads psychological literature nowadays he is sure to come across the phrase "the threshold of consciousness." Here is a simple picture—a two-room house. One is the conscious room, the other is the unconscious room. There is a door between, and when an idea goes from the conscious to the unconscious room it goes over that threshold, and when it goes back it necessarily has to go over that threshold again. Then James has given us that fine figure, "the stream of consciousness." How good it is! Your thoughts and feelings flow on day after day and year after year like a stream. Practical questions arise at once. What sort of a stream of consciousness have I? Is the stream going steadily on, or is it rather like a babbling brook, making a pleasant murmur but with little power? Or like the River Platte, spreading out and disappearing in the sands of stupidity, or like a turgid stream, so muddy that it is almost impossible to see anything beneath the surface? Or is it a strong, clear, on-sweeping current to which new ideals and feelings are contributed day by day, so that as the years go on it becomes a mighty energy to turn the wheels of the world? A very good figure, and we may very well put such questions to ourselves.

Professor Cooley, of Michigan, has suggested another figure which I think would sufficiently antagonize Professor Macnaughton if he were here. Let us imagine a room, the walls and ceiling of which are incrusted thickly with incandescent lights. Near the door let us imagine a box containing a lot of switches. You turn on a switch and that immediately lights up a line across that wall, over the ceiling and down the other wall. You can stand there and turn on and off these switches and light up those circuits of electric lights at will. In similar fashion you have brain cells and these brain cells are like incandescent electric lights, the filaments of which connect with one another into circuits of association. When some one turns on a switch, by a visual image, or by an odor, or by a sound, there suddenly lights up in your mind one of these circuits of memory. When you look at the turrets of that beautiful Chateau Laurier, what do you see? Are you not in the valley of the Loire? Can't you see the frowning front of Chinon, the gracious facade of Asay-le-Rideau, the lacelike stairway of Blois, the massive turrets of Amboise? It is a fine thing to have one's mind well-wired, to have the circuits in good condition. A personal question you can put to yourself is "What sort of mental lights have I? Are they four candle power or thirty-two Tungsten? Are my switches in perfect working order, or are my circuits crossed, and fuses melted so that my mind is in semi or complete darkness?" This is a very practical way of applying these figures; and this address would be of no value if it did not now and then sound the homiletic note.

There is another figure to which I call your attention. It is the figure of the stereopticon lecture. We all go to stereopticon lectures. Many of us are fond of moving pictures. We may say we are not, we may take high ground, but we sneak in to see them. We all like pictures, we are like children in this regard; and when we go to a stereopticon lecture we know that no matter how stupid the lecturer may be, once in two minutes we are going to get a slide. The laws of physics work in our interests, for if the lecturer keeps a slide in the lantern longer than two minutes the heat is likely to break it. Therefore cupidity thwarts the passion for speech. We are all the while attending stereopticon lectures. We all have screens in our minds, and on these screens pictures are passing constantly. Our mental life can be described accurately and vividly in terms of these pictures, these slides of memory and imagination. Then, too, there is a spectator within us looking at the pictures, commenting upon them and having feelings about them. The character of the individual is revealed by the pictures he fondly holds on the screen of his mind. How curiously mental pictures are related to one another, and what strange slides some of them are! Let us examine them for a little.

In the first place, it is important to notice that some pictures are very vague. That means they are not well focused. You have been to a stereopticon lecture when the man could not work the lantern and when there were most unseemly altercations between the gentleman on the platform and the unfortunate person who was trying to run the lantern. It is bad enough to have the slides put in upside down; it is bad enough to have them start at the end of the lecture instead of the beginning; it is bad enough to have one of your favorite colored slides drop on the floor, but the worst thing is to have a slide so badly focused that you cannot tell what it is. Do you realize that in these mental panoramas, in these stereopticon exhibitions that we are attending, there are some pictures that are not well focused? Think of the ideas we have that are vague and hazy. Attention is the power which focuses pictures on the screen of the mind. You haven't possession of a picture until you can see it in its clear outlines. What a deal of vagueness there is in the world! How many ideas that, as a friend of mine says, "are fuzzy around the edges." The only mental picture that is to be trusted is the slide which is precise and clear and definite and accurately focused.

Then another thing to note about these pictures is the way in which they are related to one another. We may have a passive or an active attitude toward the show that is going on. When you are in a passive condition, you know how oddly these pictures come on, what an absurd relation sometimes they have to one another. They seem to have no logical connection whatever. Some pictures always appear together, although they may have no connection except that they were originally associated in that way, and you can never get one of them without the other turning up. It is amusing, sometimes grotesque, sometimes absurd, the way these pictures are grouped. Some come in what we call a logical series; that is, they have some connection with one another, one brings up another, and you go through the series from one point to another. Oh, how promiscuously these pictures come on the screen of the mind, some without the slightest premonition of their coming. It is fascinating to recall the process by which one picture suggested another, and that one a third. At times the spectator within us takes control and says, "I won't have that picture any longer, I will have another." He has the power to summon pictures. There lies the control. If there be in this world anything like self-control, that self-control is in the control of mental imagery. That control is the secret of personality. In terms of mental imagery can we define the individual and his power over himself, for mental pictures control our lives. Habit is merely a mental picture which has become automatic. Just because you can do the thing although you are conscious of the picture no longer, it does not mean that that image was not there once. When I want you to do something, I tell you to do it. If I have authority over you I put the picture of that act in your mind and I hold it there until it has worked itself out in conduct. Of course, I should not go about it in that way, with you, as an association of librarians. Not at all. I should attempt it in quite another way. I should sneak the picture into your mind by what we call indirect suggestion. If you were somebody I could browbeat into doing what I told you to do, I could order you to do it. In other words, I could jam the picture right into your mind, hold it there and say, "Now, you do that thing." But, with you, I couldn't do it that way. But I think I could manage some of you at any rate. When you were not watching, I should slip the picture into your mind. You wouldn't know where it came from. It would come on naturally. You would think you thought of it yourself. That is the gentle art of suggestion, to slip a picture on the screen of a person's mind without letting him know how it got there. He naturally, then, supposes it is the result of those deceptive processes which he identifies with personal thinking. You cannot cram ideas down the throat of a free-born American citizen. Of course, you can't. Moreover, what is the use of cramming them down his throat when you can squirt them into him with a psychological hypodermic? That is the charming thing about suggestion. All control, then, is control through mental imagery. You have had this experience, for example. As you stood in a railroad station and a locomotive came thundering in, you have had, for a moment, an impulse—not only an impulse,—you have had the picture in your mind of throwing yourself under the locomotive. From a casual inspection of the company I should suppose that none had tried that experiment as yet. Why? Because you were able to remove that picture from your mind and substitute for it another—a picture of the presumable appearance of things in a very short time after you had made the experiment, or the vista of a long and happy life stretching out before you, or of obligations to family and friends. Any one of these pictures will serve the purpose. But if the time ever comes when that picture of going under that locomotive gets firmly fixed in your mind, nothing except physical force from without can prevent your going under the wheels. Every motor idea that comes into our minds tends to work itself out into action. That is the secret of the hypnotic sleep, in which the person who is under your control, through pictures produced in his mind, automatically carries these things out into action. Mental imagery is the secret of life, and control of mental imagery means the control of mankind. Self-control is the control of one's own imagery.

The personality, the self, is revealed in this imagery and in the attitude of the spectator within us. You know those different attitudes. There are some pictures that come upon the screen of your mind, and the spectator within you is immediately interested. For example, here comes a picture on the screen of your mind of the day when that board that you had been working with so long, that unintelligent board, that board made up of reactionary people that you had so long been nursing, came to the point where you were able to tell them of that scheme of yours which must inevitably, logically and remorselessly lead to putting the library in your community on a modern basis. When the picture of your triumph on that occasion comes upon the screen of your mind, the spectator within you claps her hands and says: "You were very clever about that; you waited a long time, you worked it skillfully, you certainly are a capable person." You all get pictures of that kind. You can't help looking at them. Here is another slide—a reception. Of course, when they said that yours was an extremely becoming gown, you were quite delighted; and you talked well; you did say a lot of brilliant things. To be sure they were not original—nobody expects that—but you were very fortunate in your anthology that afternoon. I can see by the broad and amiable smiles all of you are wearing, that pictures of a similarly agreeable kind are by suggestion appearing on the screens of your minds.

But you have pictures of a very different sort. How could you?—of course, you were just from the library school, it was only your first position, but, at the same time, how could you?—you cannot imagine how you could have mistaken Sir Thomas More, in the sixteenth, for Thomas Moore in the nineteenth century. How could you have done it? Yet you did. When that picture comes on the screen of your mind the spectator within you shrinks and says: "Why must we look at that? Take it off at once." It would be very piquant if I could take other illustrations from your own experience, but I cannot do that. I shall have to take one out of mine. I have a number which my spectator dislikes. Here is a recent one:

At our experimental farm we have a very beautiful new saddle horse. As I pretend to be something of a rider I went to ride this horse. There was a sort of celebration that afternoon, and I thought it would be pleasant for the president of the University to ride one of these blooded horses to give eclat to the affair. I went out and rode this mare about. Everything went well until I encountered several traction engines in active operation and a number of automobiles. I was in a very narrow place. There being almost no other direction for the mare to go, she began to take a vertical course. She was in good condition and rather rotund, and the laws of physics worked out their inevitable result. At forty-five degrees I held on admirably. At sixty-five degrees, I began to feel some little distress. At eighty degrees I looked behind me, and at 89½ degrees I slid off. Now, such is the admirable press organization in the great state of Minnesota that every newspaper, I think, in the commonwealth—I haven't found one yet that skipped the item—called attention to the fact that the president of the University had come a cropper—or, if not strictly a cropper, the effect of it was the same. One of the papers was kind enough to say that, being an expert rider, I landed on my feet. If I did, my fundamental ideas of anatomy have been entirely erroneous. As I have been traveling about the state in the last few weeks, I haven't met a man, woman or child who has not sooner or later worked that back-sliding into the conversation. This is a picture of which, when it comes on the screen of my mind, the spectator within me says, "I suppose we have got to stand this, but it is certainly getting to be slightly tiresome." We all get slides of that sort in our collection.

Then there are pictures of another sort, beautiful pictures, inspiring pictures, yet for some reason the spectator within us is left cold and unaffected by these images. It is the very tragedy of human nature that we may intellectually know beautiful, noble, inspiring things, may have uplifting visions, and yet the spectator within us may look at these things and never so much as feel a flutter of the pulse. We do not incorporate ideas until these things have become not only a part of our intellectual apprehension, but until they have become a part of our emotional nature, until we make them into the very fabric of ourselves. We define the self, therefore, in terms of mental pictures, and the control of self is the control of mental pictures. Let me know the pictures to which you constantly revert, let me know the pictures that come steadily to the screen of your mind, let me know the pictures that the spectator within you gloats over and feels a loyalty to, and I will reveal to you your character. Whatsoever a man thinketh in his heart, whatsoever pictures he makes his own, whatsoever pictures he gloats over with joy and satisfaction, these things reveal the true personality.

Consider another thing: the content of these pictures, the kind of pictures. How are they determined? They are determined by our social relationships. Do you think the same sort of pictures are in the mind of the Englishman as are in the mind of the American? Do you think the same kind of pictures come into the mind of the Frenchman as come into the mind of the German? There are certain universal pictures, the same for all educated people, but most pictures take on a group character. What are the pictures that come into your minds as librarians? Pictures of your active calling. These pictures are very definite. You have your own phrases, your own language. These phrases and these forms of speech are themselves the labels of mental imagery. Every social group is held together by its phrases. Oh, how we love these phrases and how glibly we repeat them! So too, college professors have their own phrases. What a sesquipedalian terminology it is with which they bewilder the lay mind and overpower the student! How would lawyers get on but for their monopoly of archaic forms of speech? Think of the doctors' terminations, so many of them fatal, in itis, which they have invented in the last few years. So every social group determines very largely the conduct of its members by cleverly putting into their minds the imagery that it wishes to have carried out. Why do you dress as you do? Do your clothes represent your individual taste? In some measure, but for the most part you dress as you do because society puts fashion pictures into your heads. You ladies dress as you do because these fashion plates and the women you see upon the street leave a deposit in your mind, a composite picture, and that composite picture works itself out in your own charming and becoming wardrobe. To be sure, as librarians, you have individuality; as librarians, you have a certain personal distinction, but it is, after all, only a variation upon the common modes which you share with all your sisters everywhere. These standards, these ideals, these types, that we talk about are put into our minds by the social groups of which we are members, and we are to a very large extent dominated by these pictures. Do you doubt it? Just examine your mental imagery. How much of that mental imagery have you secured as a result of your own first hand experience? How much of that mental imagery represents original thinking? How much of that psychic panorama have you received ready-made from the society to which you belong?

The pictures come quickly upon the screen of the mind. How readily they are summoned by suggestion! If I had time I could bore you almost to extinction by calling up in your minds images that are common to all of us. We all have large collections of slides. The depressing fact is that for the most part they are identical. How refreshing it is to meet an original person. Who is the original person? Just the person that has some slides that were made at home. Most of us have the same old, tiresome slides. When we have to make conversation, what do we do? Go to the pigeon-hole, take out a slide, put it into our minds and then reflect it to our friends. We have to be able to talk on a great variety of subjects. In the nature of things we could not think out these things for ourselves. Society has provided the slides. There they are, like a well-organized collection, a card catalog, with a topical index. To suppose that we make the slides ourselves is a grateful illusion. There may be a few who do, but most of us get ours from the stock houses in New York and Chicago.

Was there ever a time when pictorial imagery was presented to the public as in these days? These are the days when people's minds are filled with visual imagery as never before in the history of mankind. And never before was the same imagery spread over so wide an area. Think, for example, of what cartoons do. Cartoons are a substitute for thinking. Cartoons are ready-made slides. Cartoons are arguments ready to serve. Cartoons demand no intellectual effort. They would not be successful as cartoons if they did. A cartoon which you have to analyze is in the nature of things a mistake and a disappointment. A cartoon tells the story instantly. It is a slide put into the minds of millions of people in a single week. Then consider the imagery sent out by the illustrated magazines. There is only one magazine, I think, now, that does not have illustrations. Some of us take it just for that reason. It has a kind of distinction on that account. The Atlantic Monthly has no illustrations except in the advertising pages—some of those are very good—but it has that sense of uniqueness, that kind of snobbishness, which is appreciated even in a democracy like our glorious democracy, where we are all free and equal, as contrasted with the social distinctions of this monarchy under which we are so hospitably received this evening. It is a mistake to suppose that the visual is suggested merely by drawings and photographs. When we go to a lecture on "Mother, Home and Heaven" we expect the speaker in lieu of lantern slides to supply "word pictures." The Sunday supplement is the absolute symbol of our state of mind.

As we haven't time to think—i. e., to make our own slides—naturally we haven't time to bring our collection together to see whether it is consistent. We are going about with a most extraordinary selection of slides. The only reason we get along with peace of mind is that we do not take our slides out of the different boxes at the same time. You keep your religious slides in one box, your moral slides in another, your business slides in another, your professional slides in another—and never take anything out of two pigeon-holes at once. For that reason you go through life without knowing what an extraordinary collection of hopelessly contradictory and mutually destructive ideas you are carrying about under that hat of yours. It is only by keeping these things in their boxes that we have anything like peace of mind. A few people, of course, are constantly going through their boxes, sifting, reorganizing and unifying their collections. These are the men and women who think, who have courage, and for the most part they represent genuine leadership. But most of us are satisfied to get our slides ready made, to get them in quantities and to have them remain a most heterogeneous accumulation.

There is a vast popular demand for ready-made slides. In every possible way these substitutes for thought are being sent out. Political slides are industriously distributed. You notice the difficulty that you have just now in talking about the political situation in our glorious country. We do not yet know what to say. You see, the slides haven't yet been sent out for this week. We have to wait until the slide makers put them on the market. We are all waiting to know what to say; we are all waiting for a new set of slides which shall be adjusted to the new conditions. If you bring out that old slide about the Republican party that saved the country—No! You don't want to say anything about that. You see at once, even though it has saved the country for years—you can see that that slide won't do. It is cracked.

Pardon a digression which enforces the point that in these days everything has to be pictorial. You see, when I am addressing a group of librarians in a jaded condition, I have to use pictorial illustrations. It is true, I should like to be didactic and pedagogic on an occasion like this, but you are in a psychological condition which makes it absolutely impossible. Even the thought of listening to these songs that are coming afterward, would not keep you if I were not constantly pictorial and keeping your minds filled with this beguiling imagery.

Imagery, then, is absolutely essential; self-control and social control are dependent upon the distribution of appropriate mental slides. The very life of the nation depends upon this. Here we are, nearly a hundred million people—we always include children—whose slides must be supplied and in some fashion unified. The imagination breaks down at the thought of this vast task. This national like-mindedness is a glorious achievement. It has never been equaled anywhere on the face of the earth. To keep these millions of people, who are scattered over three million square miles, with the same fundamental pictures in their heads is a marvelous triumph.

That we are the most progressive, the most mighty, the most highly civilized country on the face of the world—that is a gorgeous colored slide, which we keep on hand all the time. There are a lot of slides like that, that are common to everybody. True, we have slides specialized for the use of various social groups, but the fundamental slides that preserve our nationality, are common to millions.

We have to have institutions that keep these slides vivid in the minds of our people. It is the greatest attempt at social control that has ever been conceived.

But the national slide industry is by no means perfected. On the whole, there is an appalling number of these pictures that are vulgar slides, cheap slides, commonplace slides, uninteresting slides. It is your business—for now I come to my analogy—it is your business, as the people who are running the moving-picture concerns of the United States, to see to it that better pictures are put into the minds of your fellow citizens. You have the responsibility of superseding in the mental collections of millions of our citizens slides that are cheap and unworthy and inaccurate and misleading, with mental pictures that are clean-cut, trustworthy, informing and inspiring. That is your business. You are in competition with the moving-picture houses. There are nine thousand of these moving-picture concerns working night and day in the United States, filling the minds of people with mental imagery. But every library is full of potential mental pictures which can be made interesting, ennobling and uplifting to millions of people. It is your privilege to get these slides out into circulation, a mighty appealing thing to do, a splendidly stirring thing to do. I hope you are thoroughly alert as members of this mental picture syndicate. You know what you have to do. You must advertise and you must capture the public in every possible way; you must not be ashamed to put out posters describing the wonderful pictures.

And what rare pictures you have! What is a novel? It is a film of moving pictures. What is a great novel? It is a series of great pictures—and what lovely pictures they may be; what interesting, what inspiring pictures they may be! What a great collection of such mental pictures you have in your libraries! And when people read George Barr McCutcheon, try to get that film away from them and give them George Meredith. You laugh at that, but how about "Harry Richmond?" Isn't it as good a story as ever Anthony Hope or as ever George Barr McCutcheon wrote? It is a good slide, a good film. When people come and want to read Laura Jean Libbey—of course you wouldn't have her on the premises—but if that is their standard try to work off Robert Louis on them. You know, there are some of Robert Louis' that are fairly sensational. You can get people started on the right road with Robert Louis if you go about it in a clever way to pull the cheap slides out of people's minds.

But, you say, there are a lot of people whose mental apparatus, if I may modify the figure a little bit,—no, it is not a modification, it is an amplification, it is a perfectly logical development of the figure,—you say that for a good many people you want a magic lantern in their mind that will focus properly. That is the business of education. That is what Dr. Robertson and I are trying to do, to make the minds of the young focus properly, on the right sort of things. You must get a great deal of inaccurate information made accurate and definite. You know, one of the great troubles with our educational system is that our ideas are so haphazard, so untrustworthy.

The scientific slides need looking after carefully. They are changed every few minutes, but we have to do the best we can to run the latest and most trustworthy slides into the minds of the people. Then think of the literary slides. I was very much interested in the discussion this morning. I fear it will go on indefinitely as long as the gentlemen do not define their terms. But I think if they were to do this they would discover that they both believe about the same thing.

But here at hand is the real application of this figure. What is it that makes life interesting? It is to be able to associate with the ordinary, commonplace experiences of life an illuminating, inspiring, fascinating imagery. Do you realize that the books in your library give no pleasure whatever except as they interpret life to people who bring the experience of life to the books? A book is a mere dead symbol until it becomes vital in the life of a living man or woman. You have books in your library in foreign languages. These books are sealed to people who do not know those foreign languages. You would not think of offering a French or German book, say, to an average college graduate. You must have people who understand the language in which books are written. So when you give a book of history or a book of science or a book of poetry to a man or woman, that man or woman must bring a little bit of life, a little gleam of life experience, in order to get into any kind of relationship with that book. Then the book reacts and becomes a guide for the further investigation and interpretation of life. And so the book and life together go on enriching human experience.

I wish we had more accurate slides about history, especially about the French Revolution. We mostly get our slides on the French Revolution from the Sunday evening sermons of eminent divines who are proving that the French Revolution was completely parallel with our times, and that France went to the bad largely because the Church was temporarily disestablished. Now, if we get our slides of the French Revolution from popular pulpits and from stump speakers we shall get some curious pictures. We want to put into the minds of the people the slides from men like Morse Stephens and von Holst before we introduce those lurid and beautifully colored slides from Carlyle and those rather melodramatic slides from "A tale of two cities." Then there is the fall of Rome, for example. Anybody can explain the fall of Rome, and we are always upon the brink of a French revolution. What we need is an accurate picture of what caused Rome to fall. Then as for Greece—Greece, that magic word! We need a lot of pictures about Greece. I have a good deal of interest in classic culture if it can be, for a large number of people, divorced from the classic languages. To suppose that there is an identity between Greek grammar and Greek life, its social institutions and its aspirations and their lessons for us, is to make a very serious blunder. You have noticed that an eminent Greek scholar from England has been lecturing at Amherst. Did he talk about grammar? No. He talked about the philosophy of Greece, the politics of Greece, the social history of Greece. These are things we need; for, my friends, you know, and you need to preach this doctrine, that modernity defeats itself. To suppose that reading the daily newspaper and having the mind filled with contemporary events gives any one a right to judge of those events, is absurdity itself. We can understand the present only as we can connect that present with the past. Therefore, if we are to have an intelligent population many men must have a vivid and accurate panorama of human history; they must be able to see the present in the light of the past, and then to predict with some little degree of certainty what we are to have in the future. Look, for example, at our present crisis. I am not going to interpret it, I do not understand it; but we cannot possibly see beneath the surface of it unless we try to interpret it in the light of the experience of other nations. What have all the great nations of Western Europe done? When we ask that question, and when we see how parties are aligned in this Dominion where we meet to-night, we cannot fail to get a little light upon what is going on at home. There the same social forces are at work, under different conditions, to be sure, but working themselves out inevitably.

So it is our business to fill the minds of our fellow citizens with accurate pictures, with definite pictures, with pictures of reality, with pictures which shall illumine every department of life. If there is any aim in education, it seems to me it is to make man a citizen of the world, to make him at home in nature, at home with mankind, at home with all the great forces which play a part in his personal development, which sweep through him into the lives of generations yet unborn. When his mind is filled with such pictures, when the spectator within him goes out to the best and finest and truest of these pictures with genuine appreciation, then you have the development of personality and the development of a great civilization.

You, my friends, are the keepers of these films and slides. It is your business to see that they are well chosen, to see that they are made available, to see that the people are stimulated, that the people are made to realize vividly what it means to have their minds filled with these true, these beautiful, these inspiring pictures which will enable them to interpret life, to enter into it more richly, to get out of it more joy, the joy of intelligent appreciation, the joy of work well done, scientifically done, the joy of comradeship, the joy of association in great enterprises. When these pictures fill the mind, when the spectator within is loyal to them, then there is richness of personal life, then there is genuine advancement of civilization.

Imagery is the clue to conduct. Without mental imagery there can be no development of character. Without mental imagery there can be no social progress. This mental imagery comes from the experience of life. You are not the sole purveyors of it. Books, as I have said, are dead and inert things until men with some experience of life come to them for further insight and for guidance as they go their way trying to understand life and to interpret it more truly and to get out of it greater richness.

There is a delight in mental pictures. May our pictures be interesting and true and ennobling, may they increase in number as the years go on, may they open up to us vistas of personal satisfaction, give us keener insight into the meaning of life and stir us to larger loyalties and to truer service. May we pledge ourselves to this great work and to the furthering and fostering of those things which Watson has so finely called "the things that are more excellent."

At the conclusion of President Vincent's address, Mr. Lawrence J. Burpee announced that M. Amedee Tremblay, organist of the Basilica, would accompany a number of Canadian folk songs which M. Normandin, of Montreal, would sing. They were given in three groups of three, and between each group was given one of Dr. Drummond's poems in character, by Mr. Heney, of Ottawa, a most excellent interpreter of these sketches of the French-Canadian habitant.

These unique, interesting and well rendered contributions to the exercises of the evening were much appreciated by all present, and at their conclusion the session closed with a brief but hearty expression of acknowledgment from President Elmendorf.

SIXTH GENERAL SESSION

(Russell Theatre, Tuesday, July 2, 3 p. m.)

President Elmendorf occupied the chair.

Mr. CARR: Many of us appreciate the work done in days past by Frederick W. Faxon, in personally conducting our post-conference tours. Business obliged him to take another course this year and cross the water. It has been suggested that we send him a wireless despatch of appreciation and felicitation in the name of the association. Madam President, I move the authorization of such a telegram.

The motion was carried unanimously, and the cablegram ordered sent.

The PRESIDENT: Now, we will proceed with the regular program, which brings us to the last of our series growing out of the idea of service to the individual, and we shall take pleasure in hearing Mr. CARL B. RODEN, assistant librarian, Chicago public library, on