It was a wise stroke of policy to make a beginning through the schools and the children. A reading public is in process of manufacture, and through the books and the readers thus introduced into rustic households even the stubborn bucolic mind can hardly fail to receive some impression. But the risk of beginning in a small way is that people will be content with small results, or, even worse, that the service may have such insignificant consequences that nobody will mind if it declines into something like the old-fashioned school library or disappears altogether. The country districts are being supplied with boxes of books; they are not being put into contact with libraries--they are not yet supplied with what Professor Adams laid down as the first essential, “a permanent collection of certain important reference books and standard works.” Such a permanent nucleus is in truth the essential basis of a library service; a rotation of book-boxes is, in reality, but auxiliary to this. Unless it be firmly realized that what has been done is only a very small beginning, and that enormously more remains to be done before an adequate library service is provided, a fatal mistake will have been committed, as paralysing to future progress as the blunder of 1850, which made public libraries a failure on the whole throughout the first period of their existence. The warning ought by now to have been taken to heart. In their manner of dealing with the rural library, the county education authorities are on their trial. If the wonted errors of bureaucratic management are committed, if there is a lack of vision and of sympathy with the villager, especially the villager who will not be hustled inside the fold of organized adult education, failure to come to grips with the thorny problems of rural psychology, and, above all, a one-ideaed zeal for economy and a cheap sort of efficiency, not much can be hoped for until public opinion, when our new readers have grown up, imperiously demands more.