In this country, the relationship between the school and the public library remains undetermined. Many of our primary schools are destitute of a library worthy of the name, and if a census were taken it would probably be found that the secondary schools are even worse off. Many school libraries have attained a musty and precarious existence through some passing gust of philanthropy, and maintain it in a more or less accidental fashion. This is not the fault of the public libraries, many of which have done more than their share in providing schools with books, and most of which are ready with the expert services needed to put school collections on a proper footing. The failure is due more to lack of a clear realization of the function of school libraries than to mere neglect or oversight. The work already described as done in the junior department at Croydon, where as at Coventry and divers other places, separate collections of books on education and teaching are provided, from which the teacher may borrow and which the public may use for reference, may be taken as representing the kind of endeavour put forth by the more active library authorities. Loan collections for schools are organized by some authorities, stationary school libraries by others. But in a vast number of places, though many if not all of the facilities enumerated above are held out by the library, the saving propensities of education committees or the indifference of teachers have left things as they were. The need for a comprehensive treatment of the problem is still more apparent now than when the Library Association in 1904 urged that the nation’s libraries were, or ought to be, an integral part of the national machinery of education. It is a vital part of the educational problem and of the whole problem of public libraries; and, whether there are to be two sets of machinery, working side by side or in reciprocation, or one set controlling both schools and libraries, the library service for the schools and the school children must be put on a proper basis, or the future of adult education and of public libraries also will be in jeopardy. Here, surely, Ruskin’s saying has a particularly forcible application--“It is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to the reader’s pondering, whether among national manufactures, that of souls of good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one.” (_Unto this Last_). FOOTNOTES: [15] The modern public library believes that it should find a reader for every book on its shelves, and provide a book for every reader in its community, and that it should in all cases bring book and reader together. (Bostwick, p. 1.)