LIBRARIANS.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Association : —

IT

T is a noteworthy incident in the history of the American Library Association that we meet for our eighth annual conference in the great North-west, more than a thousand miles from the fringe of cities on the Atlantic coast, where it had its origin and its earlier conferences were held. I know something of the North-western States, and venture the statement that no city in the East has received us with a more intelligent and generous welcome than we experience to-day in Milwaukee. Nowhere are the benefits of libraries better understood, and the purposes of our organization better appreciated than here. We are not on pioneer and missionary ground, so far as a proper valuation of books and libraries is concerned. If you ask me: "Where in the West is that pioneer and missionary ground?" I must say I do not know. I have here an official invitation from a Board of Trade which has lately established a free public library in a city a thousand miles west of Milwaukee, inviting this Association to hold its next annual conference in Denver, Colorado, and promising a cordial welcome and every kind of hospitality. The idea which suggests to a Board of Trade to establish a public library, and the idea which the masses accept as an axiom, that the maintenance of such an institution is as legitimate an object for general taxation as the maintenance of a public school, seems to be indigenous in Western soil. If you insist on my localizing that pioneer and missionary

ground to which I have alluded, I should say to our Eastern friends that you left the region when you came into the North-western States.

The present year marks the close of the first decennial period in the history of our Association. In reviewing briefly its record a mention of its precursor, - a convention of eighty librarians and others interested in bibliography, which was held in New York City, in September, 1853,-must not be overlooked. Prof. Charles C. Jewett, of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Samuel F. Haven, of the American Antiquarian Society, and Mr. Charles Folsom, of the Boston Athenæum, all of whom have passed away, were among its prominent members. Prof. Jewett was the leading spirit in the call and management of the convention, and its President. Indeed, he may justly be ranked as the ablest and most zealous of the early American reformers in the methods of library management. He was the first to collect the statistics of the libraries of the United States, which he published in 1851. One week ago three of the librarians who signed the call for that Convention, and were present, were members of this Association. Two of them were our esteemed associates, Mr. Smith, of the Philadelphia Library Company, who died on Friday last, and of whom further mention will be made, and Dr. Guild, of Brown University. The third was myself, then in charge of the Boston Mercantile Library. If I did not fear to encroach upon the theme of Mr. Barton, who will read at this conference a paper on