This is probably the first treatment of the subject in this country, and is the leading article in the second number of _The American Library Journal_, as it was then called. The writer, William F. Poole was at the time librarian of the Chicago Public Library. He mentioned objections only to explain them away. It will be noted that none of them would be described at present as "popular," and that only the third is now much heard. William Frederick Poole was born in Salem, Mass., 1821, and graduated at Yale in 1849, where as librarian of the Linonian and Brothers Library he founded Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, by which his name is chiefly remembered. He was librarian of the Chicago Public Library in 1873-87, and at his death, March 1, 1894, he was librarian of the Newberry Library, Chicago, whose building he designed on the departmental system, of which he was an earnest advocate. He was the second president of the American Library Association, serving in 1885-87. In this paper I shall use the term "public libraries" as meaning free municipal libraries organized under State laws and supported by general taxation. This definition will exclude from our notice a large number of libraries established on other foundations, some of them richly endowed and partially accessible to the public. The rapid increase in the number and importance of public libraries, both in this country and in England, is perhaps the most marked feature of educational development during the past twenty-five years; for within that brief period the first of them was opened to the public.