Thus the ideas of close interaction promoted by central control and of intimate correlation of libraries and the other instruments of public education had been well-debated, long before they were taken over, along with the more pressing question of the rate limit, as obvious items for the agenda of the Adult Education Committee, which was appointed in July 1917 as a sub-committee of the Reconstruction Committee, to be merged presently in the Ministry of Reconstruction. How this Committee handled the constructive proposals will be shown later on. Two of the reforms they recommended were embodied in a Government Bill, which became law on December 23rd, 1921. Both of these were, in essence if not in form, the abolition of illogical and obsolete disabilities, inherited from the early days of the Ewart Acts. The first grievance to be removed was the rate limit. When even the advocates of the public library thought it would be mainly the working classes that would use it, there was some reason for keeping down the cost, economic reasons as well as reasons of policy. When libraries had been in existence for more than half a century, and every class in the community used them without distinction, it was monstrous that a municipality owning a library should be debarred from keeping its own property up to the mark if it was willing to pay the bill. Bankruptcy was already threatening many library authorities even before the war; before the end of it, some were being shut up, numerous others were cutting down their services to the vanishing point. Councils were forbidden by law to pay the ordinary war bonus to their library staffs, who had before these changes been the worst-paid of their employees. It was a question of life or death. Relief must come at once, or half the libraries in the country would cease to exist. Relief was vouchsafed, and with it a second restriction was ended, that which debarred County Councils from setting up a library service for the villages. Systems of rural libraries were already springing up through the monetary grants of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and were being carried on, legally or illegally it was doubtful which, by the Education Committees. To do something to stimulate an intelligent social life on the land was indispensable, if the dreams of recolonizing Britain and reviving agriculture were to come to anything. The Bill passed, without an echo of the strenuous opposition that had greeted its many predecessors, which had made much smaller demands on the public purse. It removed two crippling disabilities, but the constructive proposals of the Adult Education Committee it did not touch. Two most formidable obstructions had been cleared away: the forward leap was yet to take. Was it to be deferred indefinitely, or might the Act be accepted as prelude to a comprehensive library charter, to be prepared as soon as the Committee’s numerous recommendations could be reduced to legislative form? FOOTNOTES: