Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, Dickens and Thackeray; Charles Dickens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable, vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The success of the experiment first illustrated on the Irwell was gradual. The provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886, only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other London districts have since followed.[87] With time the result has been more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational apparatus of free schools would do little. To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on _Public Libraries_. These figures are to the following effect. In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was 14,000. In 1866, when the State had, by the action of the Privy Council, since 1833 assumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Passing to a later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90, 60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870, no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank, have been converted into a fine art gallery.