The all-important question remains to be discussed: If a centralizing authority is required to enable the libraries of this country to take their proper share in reconstruction and in carrying on civilized life in an intelligent and orderly way, who is to be this centralizing authority? What Government department is fit for such a charge? Unless a new one is to be created, the Board of Education obviously has sole claim. This was the unhesitating conclusion of the Adult Education Committee. The Library Association, the membership of which is made up principally of salaried officers or elected representatives of the present municipal authorities, took alarm at this proposal, and especially at the corollary that the library authority should be the local education committee. The objections are, briefly and summarily, two: That the interests of the libraries might tend to be subordinated to those of the schools, and that bureaucratic control would stifle local interest and local initiative. But, as was urged in the chapter dealing with the interaction of libraries and schools, if the Board of Education undertook this wider responsibility, it should, and doubtless would, become a board of something more than scholastic education. Libraries must not be allowed to take a second place to the schools, the work of which at an early period of life they are destined to transcend. Let the local education committee attend, as now, to the schools, which will be, and should be, its first consideration. But let another body, appointed definitely for the purpose, partly no doubt from the same personnel, but well seasoned with co-opted members representing the wider intellectual interests of each locality, be responsible for managing the public library.[43] [Illustration: THE ORATORY LIBRARY.]