supply, and it was a demand for education in other directions than had been contemplated by the promoters of charity schools and Dissenting academies. Whitbread and Brougham, Bentham, Place, and Mill encouraged and directed these aspirations. Philosophic Radicalism affirmed the right of every citizen to an elementary education, which the State was in duty bound to provide. Further, such education must be unsectarian; and here were the beginnings of the age-long strife between the advocates of secular education and the defenders of voluntary schools, which were now being planted all over the country by the National Society and the British and Foreign Society. Throughout the nineteenth century the history of education was chequered by these conflicts over the rights and wrongs of religious teaching. Another thing that hampered progress was the temptation to provide schooling on the cheap, by the monitorial system and other contrivances, which were maintained for reasons of economy long after they had been discredited. We shall find this British failing again and again crippling the finest schemes, and entailing costs in the long run incalculably greater than the saving at the outset. It is a form of economy that is not economic. How deep and sincere was the working man’s desire for enlightenment is illustrated most tellingly by the co-operative institutions which it now brought into being in almost every industrial centre. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not gifts from a railway company or a large firm to its employees, but the creation of the operatives themselves, established and kept up mostly from their own unaided resources. Apart from the schools and classes for children and adults carried on by the religious bodies in the eighteenth century, these Mechanics’ Institutes, with their lectures, classes, study-circles, debating societies, libraries, and other educational activities, were the real beginnings of adult education in this country. They were the immediate forerunners of the municipal library, and, at a further remove, of the modern technical college and the polytechnic. Thus adult education begins in a spontaneous movement, ready for large self-sacrifices to achieve its practical ideals; and, at the outset, the library is recognised as an integral part of its scheme. The great mistake in the Public Library Acts, we shall find, was that they failed to build on the combination of reciprocal activities in this promising model, and thus divorced the library from the other departments of adult education. Conversely, the weakness of many admirable schemes for adult education has been neglect or omission of the library as an essential part. Once the separation had taken effect, it became very difficult to establish relations again. Librarians have since learned the impossibility of making one part of the social machine work properly in detachment from the rest. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not troubled