(3) The third method implies suppression of the school library, at any rate so far as it is anything beyond the indispensable collection of volumes required for use in the school; it is to send the young reader to the public library. If this is not far away, and especially if it has a first-class junior department, where suitable reference books can be used as well as books for entertainment borrowed for reading at home, there is nothing to deplore; but to children in distant schools the loss will be serious. The value of this third solution of the problem, when it is a real solution and not an evasion, is that the child is introduced early to a large collection of books, and also comes into a different atmosphere from that of school. Its danger is that the child may come unchaperoned to a library where there is but a perfunctory service for the juniors, and will be turned adrift in a pathless wilderness. This third method may be seen at work in the schools of Poplar. One of the poorest among the metropolitan boroughs, Poplar has been a leader in many library movements, such as the scheme of interchange between adjoining boroughs whereby all the books in a large group of libraries are made available for borrowing by dwellers in any part of the area. The libraries have long co-operated with the schools as actively as the teachers would permit. Nothing is more essential to the mental life and the economic efficiency of the future citizen than that the gap between schooling and maturity should be bridged over. Poplar has realized the fatal nature of that gap, and has long been doing its utmost to fill up the chasm. School children come to the public library to do their preparation and spend their leisure in the enjoyment of books. Classes are brought by teachers during quiet hours, and sit in the public rooms doing “silent reading.” For a long while measures have been taken so that no single boy or girl in the schools shall go out into the world without being introduced to the public library, and made acquainted with all that books and libraries can do to help them in life and the pleasures of life. Twice a week, the upper classes from schools in the borough, coming in regular rotation, attend at the nearest library to hear an address by the borough librarian, Mr. H. Rowlatt, or one of his chief assistants, on the libraries of their own borough and libraries in general, what they are and what they contain, and how freedom and ability to utilize the manifold services they afford is an invaluable part of the individual’s equipment for life.[17] The librarian and his coadjutors have always thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of co-operation with the schools; the children listen eagerly, and the results are seen in the statistics of reading.