Salvation will probably come to the rural library movement from such counties as are enlightened enough to form leagues between villages, with real not perfunctory libraries in convenient centres, or combinations of borough or urban district libraries with neighbouring villages. Only when a growing proportion of the rural public has the opportunity of direct contact with libraries, and not merely with small batches of books sent them at stated intervals, will they realize what a true library service can do. Only then will there be much hope of co-ordinating all the miscellaneous local efforts into active schemes of library extension. Incidentally, unless events have meanwhile hurried on the process of linking up all our public libraries into a national system, such combinations may furnish a suggestive example to the towns. But to achieve all this, it is doubtful if we should make heavy demands upon the county education committees, unless they depute this side of their work to a strong sub-committee, reinforced with co-opted members from outside. Representation of other interests than those of schools and education, representation of the many voluntary bodies who are striving to reanimate the countryside, representation, above all, of the people who read or whom we want to read the books, is a radical necessity. To this point there will be a return in the next chapter, where the general question of who shall manage our reconstituted libraries will arise. In the United States, where the obstacles to a rural library service are still more formidable, the town population being only 45 per cent. of the whole, various plans have been tried, and a different method than that recently adopted in this country has met with most success, the method of expansion outwards from a library at the centre, freely open to the public. The State library commissions do not flatter themselves that they have completely solved the problem, for only 794 of the 2964 counties in the United States have as yet one or more libraries of not less than 5,000 volumes; but they are apparently on the highroad to success. At all events, they are fully aware of the extent and value of their opportunities. All the states in the union have State libraries, and most have library commissions, which operate in different ways, some with exemplary thoroughness, and some, it must be confessed, rather perfunctorily. Many states have systems of travelling libraries, that in New York being the most extensive and flourishing. Yet comparing this with the rival county system now to be described, a well-informed critic says, “The few people reached compared with the great rural population of the state of New York, wherein the travelling library under the direction of the State Library Commission seems to be more widely used than in any other state of the Union, indicates the futility of trying, by means of a travelling library system operated from the capital of the state, to