in the American Library Association may be effective.  We meet together but once a year, and even then we do not bring out our full force.  We have no intention of marching on Washington en masse to secure legislation or even of forcing our trustees to raise salaries by a general library strike.  But if we can make it an unusual thing for a librarian not to be a member of the American Library Association; if wherever one goes he meets our members and recognizes what they stand for, then, it seems to me, public opinion of librarians and librarianship is sure to rise.  Our two savages, who band together for a few moments to lift a log, become by that act of association marked men among their fellows; the mere fact that they have intelligence enough to work together for any purpose raises them above the general level.  It is not alone that increasing numbers, strength, and influence make for the glory of the Association itself; the most successful bodies of this kind are those that exalt, not themselves but the professions, localities or ideals that they represent.  It is because increasing our numbers and scattering our membership throughout the land will increase the influence of the library and strengthen the hands of those who work in it that I believe such increase a worthy object of our effort.  Associations and societies come and go, form and disband; they are no more immortal than the men and women that compose them.  Yet an association, like a man, should seek to do the work that lies before it with all its strength, and to keep that strength at its maximum of efficiency.  So doing, it may rest content that, be its accomplishment large or small, its place in the history of human endeavor is worthy and secure.

MODERN EDUCATIONAL METHODS

Those who complain that the average of general education has been lowered are both right and wrong—­right literally and wrong in the general impression that they give.  It is undoubtedly true that among young persons with whom an educated adult comes intellectually in contact the average of culture is lower than it was twenty years ago.  This is not, however, because the class of persons who were well educated then are to-day less well trained, but rather because the class has been recruited from the ignorant classes, by the addition of persons who were not educated at all then, or educated very slightly, and who are now receiving a higher, though still inadequate degree of training.  In other words the average of education among all persons in the community is higher, but the average among educated persons is lower, because the educated class has been enlarged by the addition of large numbers of slightly educated persons.