If the cost of Mr. McKillop’s scheme was to be £5,000 a year in pre-war money, we can hardly expect much from £2,000 a year now, especially when the whole of the United Kingdom, and not London alone, is to be supplied. Further, it is hardly too optimistic to conjecture that the number of students and other serious readers in the population is a great deal higher now than it was in 1907, and, accordingly, that the demands upon our supplemental libraries would be proportionately more exacting. No, the Adult Education Committee have not looked far enough: a much bigger scheme is required, and the expenditure of much larger sums than they contemplate. But there is no need to be frightened by the cost; one may safely affirm that the general economic saving will be in direct proportion to the outlay on the establishment and upkeep of the experimental libraries. Whatever is spent at the centre, will be far more than made up by savings at the circumference. Mr. McKillop put the case of the student of science and technology, for whose difficulties he felt most concern, although there are numerous others whose state of destitution is no less pitiful, with a cogency that cannot be bettered. “These students may be either those whose means enable them to pursue courses of study in the splendid laboratories of University College, the Royal College of Science, the City and Guilds Institution, and other schools of equal rank, or they may be young men and women whose circumstances compel them to earn their living by daily work, and have only access to the culture and improvement offered by evening study. While the former presumably have access to the best literature of their subject in the libraries of the institutions in which they work, the latter, although, it is suggested, showing probably greater devotion and sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge, are debarred by the hours of opening and closing from the use of the magnificent collections in the British Museum, Patent Office, and other public libraries of reference. The polytechnics, it is admitted, do make great efforts to supply the books required by their students; but it cannot be contended that at present they can compete in this respect with the other institutions named, which provide for the student who has all his day for study. It is precisely for this latter class that the public rate-supported libraries of London ought to provide, and it is a well-established fact to those who know something of the inner working of the public libraries in London, that it is one of the great sources of discontent among London’s public librarians that insufficient funds, and sometimes also unsympathetic borough council committees, prevent their doing more than is done for this class. But there are inherent difficulties which have to be taken into consideration. London is not a unit; it is twenty-eight independent units without even a semblance of federation,