[1] Adult Education Committee. Final Report, p. 14. [2] e.g. That at Edinburgh (dating from 1725), London (1749), Liverpool (1758), Manchester (1781), the Newcastle “Lit. & Phil” (1793). [3] Professor W. S. B. Adams. Report on Library Provision and Policy (Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1915). II WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE? There is an enormous difference between the library service enjoyed in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete type of what a library service might be. LENDING LIBRARIES. “The jug and bottle department,” as it has been cynically called by illiberal critics, is the oldest and, in a sense, the fundamental part of a public library service. There were lending libraries before 1850, but none that could be regarded as its prototype. It was a consequence of the new democratic idea. In earlier times a library simply provided books to be read on the spot. Circulating libraries, such as began to be common in the eighteenth century, were shops that lent out books, chiefly light literature, to subscribers of the leisured classes. The literary and scientific institutions allowed their books to be borrowed, without troubling to divide their stock into distinct collections, or worrying themselves with the standing puzzle of the modern librarian, should this book, which is neither a novel nor an encyclopædia, go on the lending or the reference shelves?