The ideal plan would be to divide the large counties into sections, each centering in a town or regional library. The town libraries exist, and if proper financial conditions were arranged the towns would probably not be averse from coming into a well-planned scheme. They would gain, not lose, by the change, since the available stock of books would be enlarged indefinitely and there would be a wider apportionment of overhead charges. At present, Somerset is worked from the little watering-place of Burnham, which has no library service for itself, and books are actually sent across the width of the shire into the suburbs of Bath, a town rejoicing in a large collection of lending-library books used mainly for desultory reference purposes. How much better were Somerset mapped out into districts served from the existing public libraries at Radstock, Weston-super-Mare, Taunton, and Bridgewater, with new ones established at Glastonbury, Wells, or other places, unable singly to afford a library. Why should not Sussex be supplied from the chain of admirable libraries in her south coast towns, with a new one in the hinterland at Horsham? Kent has public libraries at Maidstone, Gravesend, Chatham, Bromley, Canterbury, and Folkestone; Maidstone, with its Bentlif Institute comprising library, museum, and art gallery, would form a central magazine hardly to be surpassed, and with subordinate centres at the other places it would be easy to cater for the whole county. Wiltshire is served from Trowbridge, where the bookless inhabitants have to be sternly repulsed from the sacred repository, whilst Calne and Salisbury have libraries of their own that might co-operate in supplying this large agricultural area. Similarly, the Gloucestershire repository is in the county town, and has no dealings with the Gloucester Public Library. Examples might be multiplied; but the reader need only open the map of the United Kingdom to see how easy and natural a thing it would be to adopt the American county library system and centre our rural service in an accessible library building, with its reference collection, its reading rooms, and above all, its lending book-shelves thrown open to all comers. The Librarian of the National Liberal Club, Mr. C. R. Sanderson, prepared a scheme for Middlesex, one of the latest counties to accept the Carnegie grant, for organizing a regional service worked from a central library established within the joint boundary of Southgate and Friern Barnet, which have between them a population approaching 60,000. The alternative to this proposal is the usual travelling library system, and it remains to be seen which will be ultimately adopted. Middlesex, most of which is mere suburb of London, is in circumstances very different from those of the average county. It already has a score of public libraries in its towns and urban districts, many of which would be anything but worse off if they were linked into a county scheme.