PREFACE.
Our Public Libraries are entering upon the critical period of their history. They have been saved by the Act of 1919 from imminent bankruptcy; but the efforts of the Adult Education Committee to find a place for them in a national scheme of reconstruction seem to have come to naught. An Act which it was hoped might have been a new charter, and have ensured their utilization as a chief instrument of adult education and the intellectual and spiritual development of the people, did away with two heavy grievances the abolition of which was long overdue; it left a programme of constructive reforms unfulfilled.
In this brief account of our public libraries, the work they have done and the far greater work they are capable of doing, many points have been suggested that call for more comprehensive legislation. The one hope now is that the urban and rural libraries already existing or soon to be may be co-ordinated into a national system, or group of systems, worked on economic lines, and empowered to act the part they were surely destined for in a civilized world.
Sociologists, including those treating of education in the widest sense, have paid scant attention to the part played by the public library in social life, in the present or the future. Even such an inventory of our intellectual assets as the Cambridge History of English Literature has in its fifteen big volumes no reference to the effects of the Ewart Act or to the vast collections of literature amassed and thrown open to the people through its operation. This book will be a small addition to a very small group of works on various sides of a momentous subject.
The author is deeply indebted to Mr. W. C. Berwick Sayers, Chief Librarian, Croydon Public Libraries, for his kindness in reading the proofs and for many useful suggestions, and to his daughter, Miss Ruth Baker, for indexing the book.