Surely this is a fatherly attitude taking the place of old punitive ideas.
=Culture Aids to the Common Life.=--When we come to the new work of making the streets safer for the spirit of youth, and the life of all more protected and happy by recreative measures standardized for personal uplift, we are distinctly in the area of parental functions of the modern state.

It takes fatherly men and motherly women to run the public playground, and to make the parks, the museums, the settlement clubs and classes, and the children's rooms in public libraries what we now will that they shall be,--the centres of eager interest and the nursery of character development.

The mention of the free public library suggests what is probably the most potent of all the higher social influences in our American life.

In the large city and in the small town alike, and even in remote rural districts served by the Loan Libraries, the opportunity to find what will feed the mind and lead toward the delight of the printed page is one that has meant more to more people who were aspiring and able to become leaders in any sphere of life than has any other opportunity; perhaps than even the public school after the main essentials of early grade teaching have been gained.
To sit in a public library and watch the eager interest of each newcomer, to see the patience, the understanding, the sympathetic attitude and the earnest effort to be of utmost service which the librarian almost invariably shows, and to see the absorbed attention of the readers in what they have been assisted in selecting, is to bless the generosity and public spirit of every one who has made the public library so common a blessing.

Not all books are equally helpful, not all give equal pleasure, it is true, but when one gets a book with a message in it for him, what a joy! One often thinks of the lovely song of Emily Dickinson when sitting thus in a public library: "He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor Or that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy ways And this bequest of wings Was but a book.