Had not the sweeping proposals of the Adult Education Committee for making the local education authority the library authority been negatived before the late Bill came into Parliament, the heterogeneous units that constitute the library service of London would after the Act of 1919 have come under the unifying influence of the London Education Committee. It was such a near thing that we may pause to consider the probable results. As already noticed, library development in the metropolis has been unequal in the extreme. Certain boroughs are still destitute of a public library system. The total number of books in the remainder is about a million and a half. All these metropolitan libraries are established under the same Acts; till recently they drew their income from a uniform rate (except in certain boroughs where a high rateable value allowed the penny to be reduced to a halfpenny); the governing bodies are in each district a committee of the borough council. Yet each group of libraries is a distinct entity. Each authority is a law unto itself. A ratepayer in one borough is not permitted to borrow from the library in the next though interchange of privileges would have been, not merely a logical but a great economic advantage. There has been no consultation between the authorities to avoid overlapping in neighbouring reference libraries, though correlative specialization would have been easy and remunerative.[27] Every reference library develops on individual lines, perhaps as a British Museum in miniature, with the result that, out of a number much larger than the total number of boroughs, not one is above the standard of a second-rate library in the provinces. Some committees offer a cordial welcome to students at school or college in their boroughs. Others repulse such students unless they are ratepayers or at least residents in the borough.[28]