feelings of discontent, and encourage economic unrest. The same arguments, observe, were heard in the brief debates accorded to the abortive amending Bills in the decade before the last Public Libraries Act. Yet the Ewart Act, at this interval of time, looks a timid, experimental, and by no means far-sighted enactment, defended against excesses by clauses that could scarce fail to make the very existence of the institutions it brought forth precarious and unfruitful. Such clauses could hardly have been accepted had not the framers of the Bill contemplated further legislation at an early date, and concentrated their efforts on making a small but irrevocable beginning. The operation of Ewart’s Act was extended to Ireland and Scotland in 1853, and the same year the Act was amended with respect to Scotland, raising the rate limitation to one penny. Ewart brought in a Bill in 1854 for raising the rate limit in England and Wales to the same figure, and authorizing expenditure of the rate income on books. By this time thirteen towns had adopted the Act. As the Government opposed the Bill, it was dropped after the second reading; but next year he brought in a new Bill, which, after a keen debate on the proposal to provide newspapers out of the rates, passed with little demur. The rate limit was now one penny, and places of 5,000 inhabitants or more were entitled to the benefits of the Act; clauses dealing with borrowing powers, the acquisition of sites, the mode of adoption by a poll of ratepayers, and the special circumstances of the City of London, were included. There were amending Acts in 1866 and later years, but this remained the principal statute for England and Wales till 1892.