Page:Traveling Libraries by Frank Avery Hutchins.djvu/8

6 are sent by women's clubs in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. In Idaho, California, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, and many other States, women's clubs are doing the same work for miners, lumbermen, farmers, and sailors. The people of British Columbia and New Zealand are successfully imitating their American cousins in this work. In Massachusetts, where nearly every community has its public library, the Woman's Educational Association is doing a most helpful work by using traveling libraries to strengthen the weak public libraries in the hill towns.

The blessings resulting from the use of the traveling libraries have been so great and the expense so small comparatively that the movement has won friends and sympathy in a wonderful manner. Enthusiasm for the work has seemed to kindle at a touch, and the pioneers have often been overwhelmed with calls for advice and information.

There is no need now to tell in detail of the instances where individual, family, and community life has been brightened and quickened by the wholesome and entertaining books that have found their way to sordid homes and isolated hamlets. Even in great cities like Philadelphia the new system has forced good books through new channels into places where they had been rarely used.

It needs no argument to prove that no small collection of books for temporary service can be as helpful to a community as a permanent public library, and that a traveling library which educates a people to desire and support a good permanent library has fulfilled its highest purpose. It is also evident that some isolated communities cannot or will not support adequate home libraries, and must depend upon traveling libraries almost entirely for their reading. There will also be a permanent need for traveling libraries in supplementing the scant collections of the smaller libraries and in supplying the temporary needs of isolated study clubs. A special library on American history with a suggestive