The public library

In the period of reconstruction after Waterloo, there was, among other analogies with the present time, a keen popular desire for education and opportunities for self-culture. It met with both encouragement and discouragement from the governing classes, more of the latter than the former, much more of direct opposition than dare show its head to-day. The state of the universities and the public schools had been since the middle of the last century more backward than ever before in history. Both universities still shut their doors to Dissenters. They had no sympathy with and probably no consciousness of the needs of the masses for self-improvement. In spite of earnest writers on education, and manifold discussions of Rousseau’s doctrines, even in the ingratiating form of fiction, nothing could stir the sullen apathy of the ruling powers; and in educational machinery and practice England lagged far behind both Germany and France. Samuel Whitbread introduced an Education Bill in 1807 which was rejected by the Lords. After his death, Brougham became leader of the group of educationists in the House of Commons, and in 1816 secured the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the education of the lower orders of the metropolis. The report of this committee furnished material for two Bills. The first, for the reform of educational charities, passed in 1818, after its best features had been pruned away by the Government; but the Education Bill of 1820, which would have extended to England the excellent parish school system of Scotland, was thrown out. Not until 1833 was the work already being performed by voluntary agencies approved, by the grant of an annual sum of £20,000 to assist in the erection of school buildings. Not until 1839 was there any recognition of the national responsibility for primary education. In that year, a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to superintend the application of grants for educational purposes. This was the forerunner of the Education Department to be established in 1856. Roebuck in 1833 had failed to carry a resolution in the Commons in favour of universal compulsory education. On the eve of the Education Act of 1870, it was computed that there were nearly as many children without any kind of schooling as there were attending all the state-aided and private schools put together. So slowly had education advanced.

But, whilst Parliament was engaged in repressing or ignoring educational demands, or debating whether it was wise or safe that the commonalty should be educated at all, the people, headed by those who had faith in an educated nation, were establishing the requisite machinery for themselves. There had been elementary schools of a sort in existence in most parts of the country for nearly a century. The academies set up by the Dissenters after the Toleration Act, the charity schools of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the schools founded by the Methodists and the Society of Friends, provided a general education based primarily on the principle of moral and religious instruction. Many of these schools catered for grown-up persons as well as children; the Sunday Schools, for instance, which sprang up after 1780, taught reading and sometimes writing to the illiterate of all ages. There were also private schools in the towns and many villages where the rudiments were imparted, unsatisfactorily, for a few pence. These organized efforts were mainly the work of middle-class evangelicals and philanthropists intent on the moral and religious improvement of the people. But new motives came into play in the new century, and the people themselves began to take an active part in the movement, with far-reaching results. Political agitation might be repressed, but an intellectual awakening could not be extinguished. Knowledge was demanded for its own sake; it was demanded also for economic reasons. The artisan who saw wonderful mechanical inventions enabling him to perform his operations with undreamt ease and efficiency, or depriving him of his job, was roused to an intense interest in science and a desperate desire to fit himself for a place in the new industrial order. The country was flocking into the towns; the major part of the population was becoming industrial. Education was perceived to be a necessity of life, and a necessity that concerned, not merely the rising generation, but even more momentously the adult workman. A passionate demand for education was faced with a sporadic supply, and it was a demand for education in other directions than had been contemplated by the promoters of charity schools and Dissenting academies.

Whitbread and Brougham, Bentham, Place, and Mill encouraged and directed these aspirations. Philosophic Radicalism affirmed the right of every citizen to an elementary education, which the State was in duty bound to provide. Further, such education must be unsectarian; and here were the beginnings of the age-long strife between the advocates of secular education and the defenders of voluntary schools, which were now being planted all over the country by the National Society and the British and Foreign Society. Throughout the nineteenth century the history of education was chequered by these conflicts over the rights and wrongs of religious teaching. Another thing that hampered progress was the temptation to provide schooling on the cheap, by the monitorial system and other contrivances, which were maintained for reasons of economy long after they had been discredited. We shall find this British failing again and again crippling the finest schemes, and entailing costs in the long run incalculably greater than the saving at the outset. It is a form of economy that is not economic.

How deep and sincere was the working man’s desire for enlightenment is illustrated most tellingly by the co-operative institutions which it now brought into being in almost every industrial centre. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not gifts from a railway company or a large firm to its employees, but the creation of the operatives themselves, established and kept up mostly from their own unaided resources. Apart from the schools and classes for children and adults carried on by the religious bodies in the eighteenth century, these Mechanics’ Institutes, with their lectures, classes, study-circles, debating societies, libraries, and other educational activities, were the real beginnings of adult education in this country. They were the immediate forerunners of the municipal library, and, at a further remove, of the modern technical college and the polytechnic. Thus adult education begins in a spontaneous movement, ready for large self-sacrifices to achieve its practical ideals; and, at the outset, the library is recognised as an integral part of its scheme. The great mistake in the Public Library Acts, we shall find, was that they failed to build on the combination of reciprocal activities in this promising model, and thus divorced the library from the other departments of adult education. Conversely, the weakness of many admirable schemes for adult education has been neglect or omission of the library as an essential part. Once the separation had taken effect, it became very difficult to establish relations again. Librarians have since learned the impossibility of making one part of the social machine work properly in detachment from the rest. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not troubled with unprepared and indifferent readers. They led their horses to the stream and had no difficulty in making them drink. The troughs provided by their municipal successors were larger and handsomer, but the excellent supply of water was too often unappreciated.

Ewart and his coadjutors in 1850 concentrated on the single object, libraries; and libraries they got, their bare object—bare at first in the literal sense of the word, till they were later on allowed to spend money in furnishing them with books. As a consequence of this policy, libraries and art galleries, schools, technical education, university extension, tutorial and continuation classes, have carried on their work on separate lines, though labouring for identical ends, and though they might have worked in unison much more effectively and economically. The problem now is to bring them into harmony again. Perhaps the time was not ripe for such a comprehensive alliance. Perhaps, also, had such an idea been realized it would have had to undergo the blighting influence of the examination system and payment by results. On the other hand, a popular institution might have contained the antidote to those delusions. At all events, it is a matter for lasting regret that a great opportunity was missed. Nationalized Mechanics’ Institutes, cured of the imperfections due to their dependence on the voluntary support of the unwealthy, with their numerous activities developed, their technical and utilitarian classes supplemented by humanist, non-vocational teaching, and the recreative side fully expanded, would have been an invaluable instrument for the great social effort which was then and is now required. And the initiative would have come from below, not from above; the danger of bureaucratic and academic projects for other people’s welfare would have been avoided. A central part of this many-sided organism would have been the library, a part ministering directly to every other part. Such a conception is still useful. In town life the different agencies may have to work side by side, though there need not be dense partitions between. In the villages, where there are no museums or picture-galleries, and the club is too often only a well-meaning but aimless substitute for the public-house, institutes of such a composite and elastic type are obviously the very thing required.

The first of these promising institutions came into existence in 1823. George Birkbeck had given free courses of lectures to artisans at the Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, where, after his removal to London, there had been a schism. The seceding members set up for themselves the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, and elected Birkbeck their first president. Next year, the London Mechanics’ Institution, now Birkbeck College, was started in emulation, speedily enrolling some 13,000 working men as members. That same year saw the establishment of an institute at Manchester, which had had a Literary and Philosophical Society since 1781, an offshoot of this, the College of Arts and Sciences, being a sort of prototype of the new working men’s institution. Huddersfield, Leeds, and other industrial towns followed suit next year; and by 1837 the West Riding had so many that a union of mechanics’ and similar institutions was formed, to be followed in 1839 by a Metropolitan Association, and by a Lancashire and Cheshire Union in 1847. “In 1851 it was estimated that there were 610 institutes in England with a membership of over 600,000, that the number of lectures delivered in 1850 was 3,054, and that the number of students attending classes was 16,029.”[1] In 1849, four hundred Mechanics’ Institutes had between three and four hundred thousand volumes, with a circulation of more than a million.

In his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Brougham, one of the four trustees of the London institution, announced the programme of what Peacock in Crotchet Castle nicknamed the “Steam Intellect Society.” Lectures and conversation classes, on the lines of a modern tutorial class, libraries and book-clubs, were to be provided; and, as a more extended enterprise, elementary primers and other cheap works on science and the useful arts were to be published for the benefit of the working classes. Brougham was the first president of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827 to give effect to this second part of the scheme. Dr. Folliott tells the company at Crotchet Castle how his house was nearly burned down by his cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract published by the Steam Intellect Society, and reading what he calls “the rubbish” in bed. Other persons, besides Peacock, were disturbed by this portentous “march of intellect.” The Mechanics’ Institutes spread to all parts of England and Scotland, but they failed, from lack of means, to find the qualified lecturers and experienced teachers that their well-meaning but ambitious aims required. Good teachers were very scarce in those days. It was more than combinations of the lower middle classes unaided by public funds could be expected to achieve. When, in the course of two decades, the first enthusiasm faded, the buildings fell more and more into the hands of those who could afford to maintain them as comfortable lounges and literary clubs. This educational failure and the secular nature of the education that they sought made them unsatisfactory in the eyes of the Christian Socialist group, who in 1854 founded what they considered a better type of mechanics’ institute in the Working Men’s College. But the Mechanics’ Institutes, though most of them were transformed or absorbed into a different kind of institute, did not cease to exist; a number have survived to this day or the eve of it, and some have carried on work of priceless importance, side by side with the public libraries, which were now about to arise.

To say that there were no free libraries for the people before 1850 is practically though not literally true. Those interested in the history of libraries can point to many older examples, certain of which were open to all comers. Long before the nineteenth century idealists schemed to provide every reader in the nation with access to books, as for instance the Scottish grammarian James Kirkwood, author of a pamphlet in 1699 entitled “An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of Bibliothecks in every Paroch throughout the Kingdom,” and of a project for erecting a library in every presbytery or at least county in the Highlands. The project was approved by the General Assembly, but had no great results. In the Middle Ages, many of the monastic libraries were nominally open to the public; but as a reading public hardly existed the fact does not amount to much. Nor is it of more than antiquarian interest whether London had a public library as far back as the early fifteenth century, the joint foundation of Sir Richard Whittington and William Bury. Readers did exist at the beginning of the next century, wherefore the appearance of a city library here and there is of more significance. Norwich claims to have the oldest of these that has never perished, founded in 1608 and preserved in the public library there to-day. The library founded at Bristol in 1615 came under the operation of the Public Library Acts when these were adopted by that city in 1876. The venerable Chetham Library at Manchester dates from 1654, when the books were placed in the quarters they still occupy in the college built in 1421. The number of volumes is vastly greater, but the Chetham Library has not changed in character or in the atmosphere of a still remoter antiquity that it had at its beginning. Dr. Bray and his associates established 78 parochial libraries and 35 lending libraries between 1704 and 1807, which were meant for the use of poor clergymen. He also secured an Act “For the Better Preservation of Parochial Libraries;” but this in time became a dead letter. The British Museum was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened to the public in 1759, and gradually absorbed various royal and other collections, forming a great storehouse of books for scholars and other literary workers. London, nearly a century later, when the public library agitation was in progress, had four public or semi-public libraries, those at Sion College and Lambeth Palace, and Dr. Williams’s and Archbishop Tenison’s libraries. In a number of large towns, readers of the better class enjoyed the advantages of good reference and lending libraries belonging to the Literary and Scientific Institutions.[2] The library work of the Mechanics’ Institutes has already been described. But the libraries of various kinds that were in existence, most of them subscription libraries or otherwise restricted to a narrow class of users, served only to whet the appetite of the ardent seeker after knowledge, and to provide the apostle of popular culture with an illustration of the possible.

The campaign which led to the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1853 opened in 1844, when Richard Cobden presided at a public meeting in Manchester to consider the means of improving popular taste. Joseph Brotherton, the member for Salford, laid the proposals carried at this meeting before the influential William Ewart, member for the Dumfries Burghs, a rich, well-educated, much-travelled person, who was an old parliamentary hand, with a general desire to see his country provided with library facilities at least equal to those which he had found on the Continent. Brotherton, a Liberal of the Manchester school and a strict Nonconformist, had a profound belief in an educated people, and a special confidence in the Lancashire operative; he was returned again and again for Salford, holding the seat continuously 1832-57. These two public men found an energetic and well-informed coadjutor in Edward Edwards, a supernumerary assistant in the British Museum, who had cut a prominent figure in the parliamentary inquiry into the administration of that library, writing pamphlets and appearing as an expert witness before the second Select Committee in 1836, after forcing himself into notice by his severe handling of the evidence laid before the committee of 1835. His wide knowledge of libraries at home and abroad and his thorough acquaintance with the methods of the British Museum, particularly on their defective side, together with the freedom and far-sightedness of his criticisms and suggestions for reform, impressed the committee, and led, rather surprisingly, to his being given his post in the Museum in 1839. Later, his independent attitude led to friction with his chief Panizzi, and he left abruptly in 1850.

Edwards was broad-minded enough not to pin his faith on libraries alone as an engine of intellectual progress; he took part as a pamphleteer in the warfare over London University in 1836, persistently maintained that libraries and schools were complementary to each other, and pointed out that libraries should fulfil a very definite function in promoting the intellectual life of all classes. His radical views on the extension of hours and the opening of the reading room in the evening, on branch libraries for the utilization of duplicate books, on improved catalogues, the better supply of foreign literature and materials for research, and on numerous points of administration at the British Museum, have been fulfilled in large part since his time; yet some still remain a counsel of perfection.

His aid was enlisted by Ewart and Brotherton after he had published some long articles, packed with statistics, on the inadequacy and inaccessibility of the library resources of Great Britain and Ireland, and on the liberal provision enjoyed on the Continent, which had a great deal to do with making converts and securing votes when public library legislation was before Parliament. Edwards probably exaggerated his case, and painted too glowing a picture of the wealthy Continental libraries, at any rate in the freedom of access said to be enjoyed by every citizen. But his instances of British scholars put to undue expense and compelled to live abroad in order to have libraries of historical material at hand were relevant enough. Gibbon complained that he had the greatest difficulty in consulting books and had to obtain them from abroad at a heavy expense; he found himself better provided when living in Switzerland or France than in his own country. Buckle, later on, and, still later, Lecky and Acton had to seek their material in Continental libraries. One telling point Edwards made, that England was unrivalled in its private collections, though so poor in those open to the public—a state of things by no means wholly remedied yet.

Meanwhile, Ewart and Brotherton having put their heads together, a piece of legislation was secured that would and did ensure the establishment of a certain number of public libraries, rate-aided if not entirely rate-supported. This was the Act of 1845 for “Encouraging the Establishment of Museums in Large Towns,” first-fruits of the proposals passed by the Manchester meeting of the previous year. It authorized the levy of a halfpenny rate, in towns of not less than 10,000 inhabitants, for the erection of museums of science and art; it did not allow public funds to be used for purchasing books or even exhibits; and it was supposed that salaries and other maintenance charges would be defrayed out of the penny-fees for admission. Timid and inadequate as such measures were, the Act was followed at once by the opening of museums at Warrington, Salford, Canterbury, Liverpool, Leicester, Dover, and Sunderland, the first three towns forming collections of books as well. In 1848 Warrington provided the first free reference library under the Act, and also a lending library for the use of subscribers. Brotherton, with the aid of a local benefactor, saw to it that a library and museum were opened at Salford in 1850. Thus, although looking back we may think it strange that museums should be started before libraries, they did prove a stepping-stone to the greater necessity.

Ewart now applied himself to inducing the House of Commons to appoint a Select Committee on the question of public libraries, and availed himself of the services of Edwards in preparing evidence and framing proposals. Edwards was the chief witness before the first Committee appointed, in 1849, and a special motion of thanks for his services was appended to their Report. He gave an account of the resources, conditions, and relative accessibility to the public of 35 British libraries, the majority of which were university or college foundations and only two, the Warrington and Chetham libraries, public in a true sense; he drew an elaborate comparison with 383 libraries of not less than 10,000 volumes apiece which, he affirmed, were open to every one on the Continent, and with about a hundred in the United States. In his examination by the Committee, he pleaded for grants from the Privy Council to supplement local contributions, as were already being given for elementary education; the inspection of libraries by the Committee of Council on Education, and the institution of a Ministry of Public Instruction charged with the control of public education and the supervision of public libraries; the establishment, not as a tax on publishers but at the national expense, of public depositories for all books published in the United Kingdom; the international exchange of books for the encouragement of libraries. Edwards urged other advanced ideas, some of which, such as the provision of a different class of public libraries for country parishes, have generations later begun to be put into actuality. A second Select Committee was appointed early next year to report on the best means of extending the establishment of free public libraries, and Edwards was again in request as a witness. An article of his in the British Quarterly for Feb., 1850, had no doubt considerable influence on the passage of the Public Libraries Act on March 13th, in spite of damaging criticisms of his statistics.

The Ewart Act, as it is often called, “for Enabling Town Councils to Establish Public Libraries and Museums,” was purely permissive. A poll of burgesses was required before the Act could be put in force, and a two-thirds majority was prescribed. The promoters believed that if buildings were put up, suitable contents would be forthcoming from local benefactors. Accordingly, no power was granted to buy books. The rate levied must not exceed a halfpenny, the same as had been allowed by the Museums Act, of which this was merely an extension. The debate on the second reading is remarkably interesting. The arguments of Ewart, Brotherton, the father of Labouchere, and even John Bright, were essentially utilitarian. “Nothing,” Bright was sure, “would tend more to the preservation of order than the diffusion of the greatest amount of intelligence, and the prevalence of the most complete and open discussion, amongst all classes.” Brotherton said, “Here were £2,000,000 a year paid for the punishment of crime, yet honourable gentlemen objected to tax themselves a halfpenny in the pound for the prevention of crime. In his opinion it was of little use to teach people to read unless you afterwards provided them with books to which they might apply the faculty they had so acquired.... He was satisfied that expenditure upon this object would be productive not only of immense moral good but of very material public economy in the long run.” The adverse arguments were likewise utilitarian and, as a rule, economic in the purely mercenary sense. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Earl of Selborne, “was most truly desirous to see learning extended,” but protested against compulsory rating, which he loftily said would put a positive check on the “voluntary self-supporting desire for knowledge which at present existed amongst the people.” One obstructor, who “did not like reading at all, and hated it when at Oxford,” said, “However excellent food for the mind might be, food for the body was what was now most wanted for the people;” and that he would have been “much more ready to support the honourable gentleman if he had tried to encourage national industry by keeping out the foreigner.” Summed up, the objections were four: that increased taxation was undesirable; that it was unjust if not unconstitutional to make non-users pay for the upkeep of the new institution; that too much knowledge was a dangerous thing; that there were ulterior objects in the project, and that libraries might become centres of political agitation, awake feelings of discontent, and encourage economic unrest. The same arguments, observe, were heard in the brief debates accorded to the abortive amending Bills in the decade before the last Public Libraries Act. Yet the Ewart Act, at this interval of time, looks a timid, experimental, and by no means far-sighted enactment, defended against excesses by clauses that could scarce fail to make the very existence of the institutions it brought forth precarious and unfruitful. Such clauses could hardly have been accepted had not the framers of the Bill contemplated further legislation at an early date, and concentrated their efforts on making a small but irrevocable beginning.

The operation of Ewart’s Act was extended to Ireland and Scotland in 1853, and the same year the Act was amended with respect to Scotland, raising the rate limitation to one penny. Ewart brought in a Bill in 1854 for raising the rate limit in England and Wales to the same figure, and authorizing expenditure of the rate income on books. By this time thirteen towns had adopted the Act. As the Government opposed the Bill, it was dropped after the second reading; but next year he brought in a new Bill, which, after a keen debate on the proposal to provide newspapers out of the rates, passed with little demur. The rate limit was now one penny, and places of 5,000 inhabitants or more were entitled to the benefits of the Act; clauses dealing with borrowing powers, the acquisition of sites, the mode of adoption by a poll of ratepayers, and the special circumstances of the City of London, were included. There were amending Acts in 1866 and later years, but this remained the principal statute for England and Wales till 1892.

The first town to set up a municipal reference and lending library under the Act of 1850 was Manchester. A subscription reaching £12,823, of which £800 was collected by a working men’s committee, was raised; the Act was adopted by an enormous majority of ratepayers; Edward Edwards was appointed librarian, and books were acquired in readiness out of the voluntary fund. The original building in Campfield was opened on September 2nd, 1852, with great ceremony, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, and Monckton Milnes being among the statesmen and other personages on the platform. Dickens described the Manchester undertaking as “a great free school bent on carrying instruction to the poorest hearths.” Thackeray improved upon Hogarth’s contrast of the wicked mechanic reading Moll Flanders and the good mechanic reading the story of the apprentice who became Lord Mayor, by picturing the Lancashire mechanic reading Carlyle, Dickens, and Bulwer. John Bright looked forward to when the farmer and country labourer would have a library service. Norwich and Bolton were actually before Manchester in adopting the Act, Oxford and Winchester were almost as prompt. Liverpool obtained a special Act in 1852 to raise a penny rate for a library and museum. Brighton had got a local Act in 1850, but was late in establishing its library. Sheffield and Exeter refused at first to adopt the Act, but reversed their decision in 1853 and 1870 respectively. Blackburn, Cambridge, and Ipswich voted for libraries in 1853; Maidstone, Kidderminster, and Hereford, in 1855. Airdrie was the first town in Scotland, and Cork the first in Ireland to adopt the Acts pertaining to those countries. Birkenhead, Leamington, and two parishes in Westminster adopted the Acts in 1856, Walsall, and Lichfield in 1857, Canterbury in 1858. In London progress was slow and chequered. Adverse polls were recorded in the City of London, Islington, Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and Camberwell, though several wiped out the stigma later; Hackney, Whitechapel, Putney, Cheltenham, Bath, Hull, and other places were likewise recalcitrant; but Cardiff, after voting down the proposal by a majority of one in 1860, adopted the Acts in 1862. Leicester, Burslem, Warwick, Oldham, Dundee, Paisley, Nottingham, Coventry, Leeds, Doncaster, and Wolverhampton, were among the forty-six places that had accepted public library legislation by 1868, the year taken in a parliamentary report dated April 11th, 1870, from which it appears that fifty-two libraries had been established, nearly half a million books acquired, and an annual issue of 3,400,000 attained. This was the year of the Elementary Education Act, which was to do away with the enormous amount of sheer illiteracy that still prevailed, and to raise up potential readers in their millions, though it was yet too early to ask for that intimate co-operation between schools and libraries which would have taught the people not only to read but also how and what to read, and tended to make the results of even a brief elementary education deep and permanent.

The library movement made most headway in the northern counties and the midlands; the southern towns were slow in coming in. Scotland also was late in adopting the Acts—a curious fact, probably due to the way Scotland is used to the private endowment of public foundations. The Scots are frugal and saving; but no people are so generous in works for the common weal. Hence it is not difficult to understand the reluctance of Glasgow to saddle itself with a library rate, when it already had its Baillie’s Institution and Stirling’s Library, and the Mitchell Library was coming—it actually came in 1877. Edinburgh also rejected the Acts, obviously on similar grounds, until in 1886 an offer of £50,000 from Andrew Carnegie induced the city to change its mind, at first however, levying only a halfpenny rate. Ireland was very much behindhand.

The following table shows the relative rate of growth, down to 1909, of public libraries established under the Acts; it does not include a number provided by voluntary agencies or under special legislation.[3]

Accelerated growth from the seventies onwards was due to various causes, first and foremost the general advance in education, especially when the effects of Forster’s Act of 1870 began to tell. Successive amending enactments, down to the consolidating Act of 1892, each removed some obstacle. Thus the resistance of London ratepayers was conciliated by an Act in 1877 permitting them to vote a lower limit than one penny. More libraries were opened as a consequence, but the handicap of an exiguous income militated against their welfare. Many gifts of funds, buildings, or special collections of books were received from time to time, often with a proviso that the municipality should build and maintain a library. The old objection to the public endowment of libraries, that it would discourage private bounty, was thus shown to be against experience as it was against reason; though British generosity in this respect cannot stand comparison with that of rich Americans. It was calculated by an English librarian, Thomas Formby, in 1889, that in the last thirty-five years British libraries had received a million pounds from private sources, and American libraries six times as much.

A stimulus of far-reaching effect came into operation towards the close of the century, when Andrew Carnegie began to make systematic contributions, first to Scottish and then to other British municipalities, for the establishment and extension of public libraries. The benefactions of an English philanthropist Passmore Edwards, though more modest in amount, had relatively a more salutary result, because they were more carefully adjusted to local needs. The policy of Mr. Carnegie was, however, very sagacious. As a rule, he gave money for buildings and fixtures alone, on the understanding that the maximum rate allowable should be raised. The expectation was that, once started, the library enterprise was bound to go on, and that with a building free from debt it was bound to thrive. The sequels were not always so satisfactory. Many places were tempted by the free gift to build more expensive premises than they had the wherewithal to maintain efficiently. Some embarked on ambitious schemes that left them with a heavy burden of debt. Large buildings meant, of course, large staffs and heavy establishment charges; but the income was strictly limited. Hence many libraries were unable to pay their way, and at the same time afford a proper service of books. There was a judicious clause in the Scottish Act which ought to have been inserted in all, by which authorities were forbidden to raise a loan of more than twenty times one quarter of the annual rate income.

The insufficiency of the penny rate was early and acutely realized. It weighed heaviest on places with small incomes. The larger the establishment to be kept up, the smaller the ratio of establishment expenses to maintenance. The limitation had been fixed so low that most towns with a population between 50,000 and 100,000 had to pursue a hand-to-mouth policy, and content themselves with spending on books such sums as happened to remain over when all fixed charges had been defrayed. The main reason for the library books, had to be neglected for the sake of the building, the mere case that held the books. The inadequate staff that looked after both cost still more, yet were overworked and underpaid. Larger towns were better off, not merely through being able to apportion expenses more economically, but also because they had more chances of getting legislative concessions. Furthermore, the civic spirit is usually stronger in big cities: it is one of the reasons why they are big cities. There, in the great industrial centres, the old Mechanics’ Institutes were born. They have been strongholds of educational endeavour; they were the pioneers of the library movement. Thus it is not surprising to find Wolverhampton, Swansea, Warrington, Sheffield, Manchester, Salford, Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oldham, St. Helens, Walsall, Preston, Wigan, Sunderland, and several smaller industrial towns obtaining increased rating powers and widening their library provision. Many other towns would gladly have sought the same privileges, but for the cost of promoting a special Act.

For many years before the great war it was borne in more and more to the minds of friends of the movement that not all was well with public libraries, and a series of amending Bills to do away with the obsolete restriction of income and introduce various constructive reforms were brought into Parliament and steadily blocked. The various Acts for England and Wales had been consolidated in the Public Libraries Act of 1892. This harmonized several conflicting enactments, laid it down that adoption of the Acts should be by resolution of the local authority, except in London, and allowed neighbouring districts to combine for library purposes. It left the rate limitation where it was. Some infinitesimal relief came from the Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891, whereby the upkeep of museums could be charged to a special museum rate. The Local Government Act of 1894, on the other hand, introduced some complications into library law, and made it even more impossible than heretofore for rural districts to come under the Acts. Amending Acts for Scotland and Ireland passed that year.

In certain points, the Scottish Acts, which had been consolidated in 1887, had advantages over the English. The precaution against extravagant building loans has been mentioned already. Further, committees must contain not less than ten and not more than twenty members, half the number being appointed from the local magistrates or councillors and half from other householders. Many if not most English authorities draw their committees exclusively from their own body. The disadvantages are twofold. The ordinary borough councillor is an overworked person, attending many committees, among which the libraries committee rarely, in municipal politics, counts as the most important. He is apt to regard his duties on that committee in a perfunctory way. The ordinary member of a council, moreover, is elected oftener than not for very different objects from the welfare of a public library, it may be simply to keep down the rates; and his qualifications for these objects may very well tend to disqualify him for enlightened service on the governing body of a public library. A book sub-committee with hardly a single member that reads, has, unfortunately, been no rarity under the conditions that still prevail, with a chairman standing for an obscurantist and reactionary policy towards this despised department of the municipal entity. Hence the peculiar desirability of having outsiders with liberal views, a liberal education, and some familiarity with books and libraries, added to the representatives of the council. This question will arise again when the possibilities of a new regime come in for discussion.

From time to time it was suggested by critics and would-be reformers that public libraries ought not to remain a series of isolated institutions, able to co-operate neither with each other nor with the schools and other intellectual activities. Edward Edwards and also his biographer Thomas Greenwood, one of the wisest and most disinterested friends the library movement has ever had, looked forward to the co-ordination of all these departments of the body politic as a body intellectual under the supervision of a Government minister. The same reform was mooted by J. J. Ogle, a public librarian and a secretary of education, who, in The Free Library (1897), easily disposed of the argument that State inspection and State grants would mean uniformity of method. In 1904 the Library Association at their annual conference, after several sessions had been devoted to considering the pros and cons, passed a strong resolution affirming “That the public library should be recognized as forming part of the national educational machinery.”

Thus the ideas of close interaction promoted by central control and of intimate correlation of libraries and the other instruments of public education had been well-debated, long before they were taken over, along with the more pressing question of the rate limit, as obvious items for the agenda of the Adult Education Committee, which was appointed in July 1917 as a sub-committee of the Reconstruction Committee, to be merged presently in the Ministry of Reconstruction. How this Committee handled the constructive proposals will be shown later on. Two of the reforms they recommended were embodied in a Government Bill, which became law on December 23rd, 1921. Both of these were, in essence if not in form, the abolition of illogical and obsolete disabilities, inherited from the early days of the Ewart Acts. The first grievance to be removed was the rate limit. When even the advocates of the public library thought it would be mainly the working classes that would use it, there was some reason for keeping down the cost, economic reasons as well as reasons of policy. When libraries had been in existence for more than half a century, and every class in the community used them without distinction, it was monstrous that a municipality owning a library should be debarred from keeping its own property up to the mark if it was willing to pay the bill. Bankruptcy was already threatening many library authorities even before the war; before the end of it, some were being shut up, numerous others were cutting down their services to the vanishing point. Councils were forbidden by law to pay the ordinary war bonus to their library staffs, who had before these changes been the worst-paid of their employees. It was a question of life or death. Relief must come at once, or half the libraries in the country would cease to exist. Relief was vouchsafed, and with it a second restriction was ended, that which debarred County Councils from setting up a library service for the villages. Systems of rural libraries were already springing up through the monetary grants of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and were being carried on, legally or illegally it was doubtful which, by the Education Committees. To do something to stimulate an intelligent social life on the land was indispensable, if the dreams of recolonizing Britain and reviving agriculture were to come to anything.

The Bill passed, without an echo of the strenuous opposition that had greeted its many predecessors, which had made much smaller demands on the public purse. It removed two crippling disabilities, but the constructive proposals of the Adult Education Committee it did not touch. Two most formidable obstructions had been cleared away: the forward leap was yet to take. Was it to be deferred indefinitely, or might the Act be accepted as prelude to a comprehensive library charter, to be prepared as soon as the Committee’s numerous recommendations could be reduced to legislative form?