measure, a priest of literature and science; as truly, though not as ostensibly, a public instructor as if he occupied the chair of a professor. Let him endeavour to live up to this character, and in proportion as the community itself becomes conscious of its shortcomings and its needs, the librarian's estimation will rise and his position improve. We need not despair; like Wordsworth's imprisoned patriot, "we have great allies." The library movement itself is merely the fringe of a great intellectual upheaval, most visibly personified in the School Boards which now cover the country, but also obvious in many other directions. This upheaval will elevate libraries along with it, if they really are the instruments of intellectual culture we firmly believe them to be. Let us ally ourselves with those concerned in the diffusion of these educational agencies. Many of them feel, I know, that schools ought to be the highway to something better, and that even if public school instruction could be accepted as sufficient for the citizen, much of it is inevitably lost from the divorce from all intellectual life which too commonly supervenes when the boy leaves school. But, if the school have but instilled a love of reading, the library steps in to take its place:—
"Chalice to bright wine
Which else had sunk into the thirsty earth."
Let the librarian but recognise his true position, and eventually he must find his true level. I do not think that librarians as a body are chargeable
with insensibility to their duties in this respect; but it does need to be kept before their fellow-citizens, whose ideas of the profession—derived from tradition, and from personal experience among some of its inferior branches—are naturally different from those which obtain among ourselves. The librarian will therefore do well to interest himself in useful and philanthropic movements, avoiding, of course, anything tinged with party spirit, political or religious. If he is a vegetarian, or a theosophist, or anything that begins with anti, let him be so unobtrusively.
I must not conclude without mentioning an incident connected with our profession, which has recently given me great pleasure—the acquaintance I was enabled to make with the students of the Library School, mostly young assistants in provincial libraries, on their visit to London last summer. I received a most favourable impression of their modesty, intelligence, eagerness to learn, and general interest in their calling. This bodes well for the librarians of the future. I trust that they and all of us, and all whom the profession may receive into their ranks from other sources, will labour to preserve that high ideal of the librarian as a minister of culture, and no less that other possession, which our Association—if it did not actually create—has so greatly fostered that it may almost be looked upon as its creation, the feeling of fellowship and esprit de corps. We do not meet merely to read papers and exchange ideas, and provide for our administrative arrangements, but
to encourage and renovate something "better than all treasures that in books are found"—the consciousness of mutual interest, and the feeling of mutual regard, which will, I trust, be found reflected in the harmony and business-like conduct of our present meeting.
FOOTNOTES:
[1:1] Aberdeen, September 1893.