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Neoclassic economics is a thing of considerable beauty. It yet finds an increasing tendency on the part of those trained in its discipline to rebel from its neatly fitted abstractions and intriguing diagrams. The rebellion stems from two sources. Veblen's sweeping attacks upon its postulates¹⁶ shock its theoretical foundations. The rapid changes in the industrial and business world discredited it on another front by bringing into increasingly sharp relief the divergence between the institutional assumptions of the orthodox theory and the conditions actually obtaining. The giant corporation, overhead costs, and the necessity for maintenance of volume, industrial concentration, the trade association, a widening spread among income classes, advertising, the growing inability of the consumer to gauge quality, the resort to reorganization instead of the “going out of business” of the long-run analyses – what place could the orthodox theory give to these important characteristics of the existing business economy?

THE recent Home Office Return showing the names of all places in the British Isles in which the Public Libraries Acts have been adopted, and supplying the statistical information regarding issues, income and expenditure, etc., is an interesting testimony to the extent to which the Public Library has entered into the life of the community. The summary of the statistics (which are for the year ending 31st March, 1911) gives the following results. The population of the places in which the Acts have been adopted is 26,370,582; the total number of volumes in the libraries is 10,995,115 (of which 3,366,549 are in reference libraries); the total issue is 54,690,222; and the total expenditure is £814,932. These figures vary considerably from other recent surveys, but this is caused by the method of compilation of the Return. Duly recorded reference issues are included, for example, and no allowance is made for the millions of unrecorded references. According to this Return there are six library systems in the British Islands issuing over one million volumes per annum. These systems are as follows:—

MID‐OCTOBER sees the activities of the library world in full swing. Meetings, committee discussions, schools at work, students busy with December and May examinations in view, and a host of occupations for the library worker. This year—for in a sense the library year begins in October—will be a busy one. For the Library Association Council there will be the onerous business of preparing a report on State Control; for libraries there will be the effort to retain readers in a land of increasing employment and reduced leisure; and for the students, as we have remarked in earlier issues, preparations for the new syllabus of examinations which becomes operative in 1938. It is a good month, too, to consider some phases of library work with children, “which,” to quote the L.A. Resolutions of 1917, “ought to be the basis of all other library work.”