The present Central Library for Students is a step in the right direction, but it is only a step; the work will have to be done on a very large scale. This library was an outgrowth of the efforts to supply students attending university tutorial and W.E.A. classes with books to carry on systematic reading. At the end of 1915, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust undertook to provide £600 to assist in the establishment of the library, £2,000 for additions to the stock, and £400 yearly for five years, if £320 were raised by subscription. The subvention was afterwards raised to £1,000 a year, and in 1920 the issues of books numbered 15,500. The Adult Education Committee were deeply impressed by the exceptional value of the work performed by this library, and proposed that it should be made the nucleus of a central circulating library to supplement the local library service all over the country. With an assured income of £2,000 a year for ten years, they calculated that an annual circulation of at least 40,000 volumes would be attained; their estimate being based on an estimated cost of 1s. per volume issued. The actual cost of each issue, under our present benevolent postal regime, is considerably more. The figure is now probably not less than 1s. 6d. Add return postage to this, and you will see that, after borrowing a book two or three times, you might as well have bought it outright. The method of sending out books singly is too expensive. And a circulation of 40,000 a year would be a mere drop in the ocean; any small provincial library has an annual circulation of at least 40,000; a large borough library system in London expects an annual circulation of about a million. The thing must be done on a vast scale to be worth doing at all, and then it can be done cheaply, even if, as might reasonably be expected, the Post Office declines to grant a large rebate on the transmission of books issued from the national libraries. The proper method is to make our central library or libraries an integral part of the whole machine, supplying to all other libraries all, or nearly all, of the books that are not imperatively necessary on the spot for everyday purposes. Then the issues from the central library will not be in twos and threes, but in large batches, and the average cost will be reduced to an economic amount. Mr. John McKillop produced a workmanlike scheme in 1907 for such a supplemental library in London as would have provided all the students and other hard working readers throughout the twenty-eight municipal boroughs with all the books required in the most exacting course of study. He proposed that it should be established by the Education Committee of the London County Council, since its greatest immediate effect would be to supply students with expensive works not now within their reach.