The first town to set up a municipal reference and lending library under the Act of 1850 was Manchester. A subscription reaching £12,823, of which £800 was collected by a working men’s committee, was raised; the Act was adopted by an enormous majority of ratepayers; Edward Edwards was appointed librarian, and books were acquired in readiness out of the voluntary fund. The original building in Campfield was opened on September 2nd, 1852, with great ceremony, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, and Monckton Milnes being among the statesmen and other personages on the platform. Dickens described the Manchester undertaking as “a great free school bent on carrying instruction to the poorest hearths.” Thackeray improved upon Hogarth’s contrast of the wicked mechanic reading Moll Flanders and the good mechanic reading the story of the apprentice who became Lord Mayor, by picturing the Lancashire mechanic reading Carlyle, Dickens, and Bulwer. John Bright looked forward to when the farmer and country labourer would have a library service. Norwich and Bolton were actually before Manchester in adopting the Act, Oxford and Winchester were almost as prompt. Liverpool obtained a special Act in 1852 to raise a penny rate for a library and museum. Brighton had got a local Act in 1850, but was late in establishing its library. Sheffield and Exeter refused at first to adopt the Act, but reversed their decision in 1853 and 1870 respectively. Blackburn, Cambridge, and Ipswich voted for libraries in 1853; Maidstone, Kidderminster, and Hereford, in 1855. Airdrie was the first town in Scotland, and Cork the first in Ireland to adopt the Acts pertaining to those countries. Birkenhead, Leamington, and two parishes in Westminster adopted the Acts in 1856, Walsall, and Lichfield in 1857, Canterbury in 1858. In London progress was slow and chequered. Adverse polls were recorded in the City of London, Islington, Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and Camberwell, though several wiped out the stigma later; Hackney, Whitechapel, Putney, Cheltenham, Bath, Hull, and other places were likewise recalcitrant; but Cardiff, after voting down the proposal by a majority of one in 1860, adopted the Acts in 1862. Leicester, Burslem, Warwick, Oldham, Dundee, Paisley, Nottingham, Coventry, Leeds, Doncaster, and Wolverhampton, were among the forty-six places that had accepted public library legislation by 1868, the year taken in a parliamentary report dated April 11th, 1870, from which it appears that fifty-two libraries had been established, nearly half a million books acquired, and an annual issue of 3,400,000 attained. This was the year of the Elementary Education Act, which was to do away with the enormous amount of sheer illiteracy that still prevailed, and to raise up potential readers in their millions, though it was yet too early to ask for that intimate co-operation between schools and libraries which would have taught the people not