The principle to be kept in view is that the civic library is a most natural home for all the intellectual activities of a social kind going on in each community. Even if it is not convenient for all such bodies to have their headquarters there, the library should entertain the most friendly and active relations with every one. In the United States, the public library in most cities performs a large part of its most remunerative work through the medium of public and private organizations outside. It may be likened to a nerve-centre, with a network of efferent and afferent fibres and a series of ganglia throughout the social organism. Thus the New York Public Library has a long and miscellaneous list of clubs, leagues, musical societies, classes of all sorts, business and other associations that hold their meetings in its various branches. Many American libraries are ready to plant a delivery station, dispatch a travelling library, or a collection of special works, anywhere that it is asked for, or even to provide an industrial firm with books, so long as accommodation and an acting librarian are supplied. They will prepare select lists of books on any given subject, get up an exhibition to celebrate any event or help on any deserving movement: there is no end to the ways in which they are prepared to put their services at the disposal of the common weal. British libraries have laboured too much in isolation. The future depends upon, more than anything else, its coming into the closest touch with every intellectual and social agency in the body politic. It should be a matter of course for the local scientific and literary societies, the field club, the local branch of the Workers’ Educational Association and the National Home-Reading Union--to name only two out of many--to make their home in the library building. The antiquarian society should deposit its collections and books and maps here, the natural history society its specimens and apparatus, thus laying the foundations of a local museum to be housed in the situation most favourable for study, both by themselves and by other inhabitants. Local historical and regional surveys are rapidly developing, whether as pieces of research aiming at the extension of knowledge or as a practical form of education: the library, with its local records, maps, and other historical material, should always be the base.