IT was my misfortune to be absent from

the meeting at which you did me the honor to elect me to this place, and I had no opportunity, either to give my advice against that action, or to thank you for the distinction with which it clothes me. The advice I would have given is now belated; but my thanks have lost no warmth by the delay, and I pray you to accept them with belief in their sincerity. At the same time I shall venture to draw from the circumstances a certain claim upon your generosity. If it happens to me to be tripped in some of those tangles of procedure which, in such meetings as this, await the stumbling feet of an untrained presiding officer, be good enough to remember the warning I would have given you if I had had opportunity.

We are gathered for the sixteenth meeting of the American Library Association, in the eighteenth year of its existence. Our league of the libraries is young; its history is unpretentious; but it is the history of a movement of higher importance to the world than many others that have marched with trumpets and drums. Eighteen years ago, the conception of the Library militant, of the Library as a moving force in the world, of the Librarian as a missionary of literature, was one which a few men only had grasped; but with which those few had already begun the doing of a revolutionary work. To-day such ideals are being realized in most corners of the American republic. The last generation, and the generations before the last, were satisfied with the school as an agent of popular education. In our time we have

brought the library to the help of the school, and the world is just opening its eyes to perceive the enormous value of the reinforcement that is gained from this new power.

And the discovery has come none too soon; for a desperate need of more and stronger forces in the work of popular education is pressing on us. If we reflect on the social conditions of the present day, and review a little the working of the ferments in civilized society during a few years last past, we shall marvel, I think, at the timeliness of the movement which brings the public library, just now, to the front of action among the instruments and agencies of popular education. It is our fortune, good or ill as we may regard it, to be unmistakably passing through one of the greater crises of human history. In the last century, modern democracy got its political footing in the world. Its birth was older, and it had been cradled in divers nursing-places, Swiss, Dutch, English, and New English; but last century it stepped into political history as the actor of the leading part; as the sovereign of the future, mounting his throne. From the moment it came on the stage, all wise men knew that its need above every other need was education. They made haste, in our country, to build school-houses and to set the school-master at work; seeing plainly that all they might hope for and strive for in the future would depend on the intelligence that could be put into the brain of this omnipotent sovereign who had risen to rule the world.

Well, the schools and the school-masters