“The higher aspects of village life have not, however, been neglected at Nettlebed. Concerts, lectures, and dances are held in the men’s hall, which is laid with a special dancing floor of oak, famous throughout the district, and this is protected in the ordinary way by a cloth covering. Dancing classes are held weekly for children in the afternoon and for adults in the evening, and are conducted by a lady resident in the village. An instructress, under whose care the young girls in the village and district are taught cookery, laundry work, and housekeeping, lives in a house near the hall. Across the road is the school garden, divided into some fourteen plots, each cared for by one boy. At the back of the playground is an old building converted into a carpenter’s shop, in which another section of the boys work under the supervision of the village schoolmaster. All of these branches are under the control of the County Education Authority. Altogether, it will be seen that in these various ways instruction as well as amusement is provided.” Sir Lawrence Weaver, _Village Clubs and Halls_ (1920), pp. 82-3. V A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE. Centralization proved to be the only way of extending a library service to the rural districts. No village, unless through the largess of a plutocrat, could build up and maintain anything worth calling a library for itself. Given a centralized system, some sort of service can be run cheaply, and a first-class service can be run economically. Does it not follow that some measure of centralization would be good for urban libraries, enabling them to save in certain directions, and making their resources go a great deal further than they go at present in the direction of widest utility? The largest libraries have managed to be self-sufficing, not merely because they have more money to spend, but rather because their service is organized on the principle of a centralized group. There is a point beyond which it does not pay a library to provide from its own resources all that its users may possibly require. Each library must determine this point for itself. The everyday wants of its readers ought to be satisfied on the spot and at the moment; but to go far beyond that point even should a local Crœsus provide the wherewithal, would be extravagant, entailing surplusage, overlapping, and waste. Spending money on books only in occasional request is to spend too little on books in continual demand. The library of moderate means cannot pretend to satisfy both daily and exceptional wants, unless it is able to call upon outside resources, such as a Central Library for Students developed to such a capacity that it forms a sufficient reservoir for supplementing all the moderate-sized stocks in the country. If most of the urban libraries were brought into a co-operative network of libraries, with mechanism for interchange by which the book lacking here would be supplied there,