The working mechanic, the small manufacturer, the factory workman, the technical student, and the tradesman are in a more necessitous condition; they cannot give a standing order for all the newest manuals, they have no professional library from which to borrow. In highly technical industries, only the largest firms can afford to keep abreast of the rapid growth in scientific knowledge; and to do it they must install, not only a costly arsenal of books, digests, and periodicals recording the fruits of research, but also a special staff to extract, register, and index the most recent information. So rapid is the rate of progress in all departments of knowledge that books are quickly left behind, and the proceedings of scientific societies, technical periodicals, and even the daily press, must be systematically ransacked by the information bureau, if a progressive firm is to be sure of utilizing every invention and improvement in the fullest economic way. Andrew Carnegie said that his own firm wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars through failing at first to provide their managers with the fullest information on what had been done throughout the world in their departments. Is the public library to confine itself to the narrower mission of assisting the needy worker, or to launch out on this more ambitious project, and compete with the skilled staff work employed by the wealthy industrial corporation? After all, the wealthy corporation has contributed in proportion to its rateable assets to the upkeep of the library, and has, on the face of it, as good a claim to some return as the meanest ratepayer, unless the original idea that the public library was only for the working classes is still to prevail. If the public library were, in the full sense, a working part of the machinery for national welfare, there could be no doubt about the answer. As it is, only a few of the more prosperous and energetic libraries have accepted the larger obligation; and, even so, no British library can be compared with the great commercial libraries of America, with such a foundation as the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia, with its exhaustive collections of technical and business information and its staff of consulting specialists, or with the Institute of Commerce at Antwerp.