In certain points, the Scottish Acts, which had been consolidated in 1887, had advantages over the English. The precaution against extravagant building loans has been mentioned already. Further, committees must contain not less than ten and not more than twenty members, half the number being appointed from the local magistrates or councillors and half from other householders. Many if not most English authorities draw their committees exclusively from their own body. The disadvantages are twofold. The ordinary borough councillor is an overworked person, attending many committees, among which the libraries committee rarely, in municipal politics, counts as the most important. He is apt to regard his duties on that committee in a perfunctory way. The ordinary member of a council, moreover, is elected oftener than not for very different objects from the welfare of a public library, it may be simply to keep down the rates; and his qualifications for these objects may very well tend to disqualify him for enlightened service on the governing body of a public library. A book sub-committee with hardly a single member that reads, has, unfortunately, been no rarity under the conditions that still prevail, with a chairman standing for an obscurantist and reactionary policy towards this despised department of the municipal entity. Hence the peculiar desirability of having outsiders with liberal views, a liberal education, and some familiarity with books and libraries, added to the representatives of the council. This question will arise again when the possibilities of a new regime come in for discussion. From time to time it was suggested by critics and would-be reformers that public libraries ought not to remain a series of isolated institutions, able to co-operate neither with each other nor with the schools and other intellectual activities. Edward Edwards and also his biographer Thomas Greenwood, one of the wisest and most disinterested friends the library movement has ever had, looked forward to the co-ordination of all these departments of the body politic as a body intellectual under the supervision of a Government minister. The same reform was mooted by J. J. Ogle, a public librarian and a secretary of education, who, in _The Free Library_ (1897), easily disposed of the argument that State inspection and State grants would mean uniformity of method. In 1904 the Library Association at their annual conference, after several sessions had been devoted to considering the pros and cons, passed a strong resolution affirming “That the public library should be recognized as forming part of the national educational machinery.”