The question between the rival proposals now lies in abeyance. It is as well that it should lie there, till a more constructive plan is put forward on behalf of the public libraries. The country cannot afford to set up an independent system of libraries at a time when expenditure must be adjusted to strict necessities; it would be uneconomic to do so at any time. Whatever the shortcomings of the nation’s libraries, shortcomings due to the nation’s neglect in the past, these libraries are a going concern, a machine well able to carry a larger load, under which indeed they would run all the better and at a lower rate per output. How absurd to erect new machinery when the old wants only a little oiling! The proposals of the Adult Education Committee are mistaken; those of the Library Association are defective. The theorist failed to call in the expert: the expert suffered from obtuseness of vision. Will they come together now to talk it over? Meanwhile, the public libraries have been strengthening their collections of technical literature, and commercial libraries have actually been established as an offshoot of the central library at Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and Manchester, whilst at Norwich, Northampton, Bolton, Croydon, and Rochdale parts of the library have been set aside as business sections, and catalogues or guide-books printed showing how their contents may be utilized with the maximum of ease and profit. The advent of the commercial library has done more at a single blow to rouse the public imagination than any other event in the history of public libraries. Business men, who had been indifferent to mere accumulations of literature, found in this new species of library, containing hardly a single volume that Charles Lamb would have dignified with the name of a book, a bureau performing gratis all the useful services that the wealthy business concern obtains at exorbitant expense from its large office library or department of information. Within a year, the Glasgow librarian was able to report that 30,000 visits had been paid to the new establishment by business people, and a large number of inquiries by letter, telephone, or telegram satisfactorily answered. The average daily consultations during the first year at Manchester, by all sorts of persons from managing directors to messengers, was three hundred.[9] In Bristol last year the consultations of books, periodicals, files, and indexes totalled 51,181. Elsewhere the tale is the same.