Especially useful is it to those boys and young men who have a dormant fondness for reading and culture, but lack home and school opportunities.
6) The library is the ever-ready helper of the school-teacher.

It aids the work of reading circles and other home-culture organizations, by furnishing books required and giving hints as to their value and use; it adds to the usefulness of courses of lectures by furnishing lists of books on the subjects to be treated; it allies itself with university extension work; in fact, the extension lecture given in connection with the free use of a good library seems to be the ideal university of the people.
The public library, then, is a means for elevating and refining the taste, for giving greater efficiency to every worker, for diffusing sound principles of social and political action, and for furnishing intellectual culture to all.
The library of the immediate future for the American people is unquestionably the free public library, brought under municipal ownership, and, to some extent, municipal control, and treated as part of the educational system of the state.

The sense of ownership in it makes the average man accept and use the opportunities of the free public library while he will turn aside from book privileges in any other guise.
That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management.

To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity.

The largest part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.