Libraries of this special type do not yet form the major portion of the institutions supplying books on a large scale to groups of persons. Under the head of "Public, Society and School Libraries," these institutions in the United States aggregate 8,000 in number, with 35,000,000 volumes, with $34,000,000 invested in buildings, with $17,000,000 of endowments, and with over $6,000,000 of annual income. Of these the free public libraries supported by general taxation number less than 2,000, with 10,000,00 volumes, and with less than $3,500,000 of annual income. They are, however, increasing with disproportionate and amazing rapidity. In Massachusetts, but 10 of the 353 cities and towns, but three-fourths of one per cent. of the inhabitants now lack them. One hundred and ten library buildings there have been the gift of individuals. No form of private memorial is now more popular; no form of municipal expenditure meets with readier assent. Nor are the initiative and the expenditure left wholly to local enterprises. The Commonwealth itself takes part: extending, through a State Commission, State aid in the form of books and continuing counsel. And Massachusetts is but one of eight States maintaining such commissions. New York State, in its system of traveling libraries, has gone further still in supplementing initial aid with a continuing supply of books, and even photographs and lantern slides, purchased by the State and distributed through the Regents of the State University from Albany to the remotest hamlet. The first stage of all such legislation is an enabling act--authorizing the establishment of a library by the local authorities; the next is an act encouraging such establishment by bounties; and New Hampshire has reached a third by a law actually mandatory, requiring the local authorities to establish free libraries in proportion to their means and the population to be served. This seems to mark the high-water mark of confidence in the utility of these institutions. It indicates that free public libraries are to be ranked with the common schools, as institutions indispensable to good citizenship, whose establishment the State for its own protection must require.