The directors of education and the county librarians who are in charge of rural systems might learn a good deal from the district organizers employed by the Village Clubs Association. This organization was founded during the war, with Government assistance, to stimulate social life in the country, and counteract the tendency of the villagers to migrate into towns. It works principally by encouraging the formation of village clubs and institutes, and assisting these with advice and practical help, especially by getting them to co-operate in schemes for lectures, classes, entertainments, sports, competitions, and the like. Several hundred thriving clubs are affiliated to the Association, and the staff of officials--men chosen for their experience of rural conditions and insight into rustic mentality--are in touch with everything that goes on throughout a radius extending over two or three counties. Many clubs have through local benefactions acquired large and beautiful village halls, which are obviously the destined home of the village library--in point of fact, they are not yet the actual home even where the village has a library centre, bureaucratic authority much preferring the school, official routine and discipline to mere human nature. The Village Clubs Association takes an active interest in the intellectual side of rural life; it promotes the formation of village libraries, very sensibly urging every club to make itself the owner of a small reference collection, to buy some books for lending, and borrow from the Central Library to satisfy demands beyond the average. The Association, further, busies itself in promoting study circles, lectures, and evening classes, official or otherwise. It has its own library and education committee, whose activities coincide in large measure with the work that the county education committees and directors of education are doing, or ought to be doing, in carrying out the rural library scheme. Yet the Village Clubs Association and the educational authorities, even in counties where rural libraries exist and both are ostensibly engaged in furthering the same purposes, have done nothing yet in concert, have not availed themselves of each others’ services, and so far as a person who is not a Government official can make out, do not know of each others’ existence. In short, this is another notable instance of our national gift for doing things twice over and at the same time leaving them undone, of paying twice for the same job and declining to do it properly because of the expense. This too, in days of anti-waste campaigns and niggardly economy. The education committee and the director of education in each county work under the Board of Education; the Village Clubs Association is foster-mothered by the Board of Agriculture. It is, apparently, not official etiquette that the Association should recommend the village clubs to seek the benefits of the education authority’s library