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The liquidity component from financial analysis has been found to be an important predictor of a firm's financial well being. Altman's credit worthiness and financial viability system uses, among six other financial measures, the current ratio as a liquidity discriminant variable. The Altman system itself has had considerable success in the prediction of corporate bankruptcy. Altman reported that the system correctly predicted bankruptcy 93% of the time using financial statements one period prior to failure and 87% with financial statements two periods prior. The Value Line Investment Survey also contains a measure of financial strength that incorporates a liquidity measure.

Economic interdependence between nations has been the focus of considerable research. A particular avenue of international interrelationship that has received a great deal of recent attention is the integration of international stock markets. Increased trade between nations implies that domestic corporate profitability will be influenced by economic conditions in other countries. If international influence is widespread between particular markets then it is likely that measures of overall market performance will be related.

The foundation collection of the printed books now forming the Library of the British Museum was that of Sir Hans Sloane. This comprised about 40,000 volumes. To it was added in 1759 the Royal collection, begun in the time of Henry VII and inherited by George II from his predecessors on the throne.

THE enterprise of two London newspapers, the Tribune (for the second time) and the Daily Chronicle, in organizing exhibitions of books affords a convenient excuse for once again bringing forward proposals for a more permanent exhibition. On many occasions during the past twenty years the writer has made suggestions for the establishment of a central book bazaar, to which every kind of book‐buyer could resort in order to see and handle the latest literature on every subject. An experiment on wrong lines was made by the Library Bureau about fifteen years ago, but here, as in the exhibitions above mentioned, the arrangement was radically bad. Visiting the Daily Chronicle show in company with other librarians, and taking careful note of the planning, one was struck by the inutility of having the books arranged by publishers and not by subjects. Not one visitor in a hundred cares twopence whether books on electricity, biography, history, travel, or even fairy tales, are issued by Longmans, Heinemann, Macmillan, Dent or any other firm. What everyone wants to see is all the recent and latest books on definite subjects collected together in one place. The arrangements at the Chronicle and Tribune shows are just a jumble of old and new books placed in show‐cases by publishers' names, similar to the abortive exhibition held years ago in Bloomsbury Street. What the book‐buyer wants is not a miscellaneous assemblage of books of all periods, from 1877 to date, arranged in an artistic show‐case and placed in charge of a polite youth who only knows his own books—and not too much about them—but a properly classified and arranged collection of the newest books only, which could be expounded by a few experts versed in literature and bibliography. What is the use of salesmen in an exhibition where books are not sold outright? If these exhibitions were strictly limited to the newest books only, there would be much less need for salesmen to be retained as amateur detectives. Another decided blemish on such an exhibition is the absence of a general catalogue. Imagine any exhibition on business lines in which visitors are expected to cart away a load of catalogues issued separately by the various exhibitors and all on entirely different plans of arrangement! The British publisher in nearly everything he does is one of the most hopeless Conservatives in existence. He will not try anything which has not been done by his grandfather or someone even more remote, so that publishing methods remain crystallized almost on eighteenth century lines. The proposal about to be made is perhaps far too revolutionary for the careful consideration of present‐day publishers, but it is made in the sincere hope that it may one day be realized. It has been made before without any definite details, but its general lines have been discussed among librarians for years past.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

FINANCIAL fears are only less cruel than those of war, and lead men into extravagances which they would repudiate indignantly in their cooler moments. If the doings of the Economy Committee at Manchester in relation to children's libraries, as described in the article by Mr. Lamb in our last issue, are true, we have in them an example of a kind of retrenchment at the expense of the young which we hope is without parallel and will have no imitators. Some reduc‐tion of estimates we hear of from this or that place, but in few has the stupid policy which urges that if we spend nothing we shall all become rich been carried into full effect. Libraries always have suffered in times of crisis, whatever they are; we accept that, though doubtfully; but we do know that the people need libraries.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Except that there is a more intense international situation the circumstances in which we open our twenty‐first volume differ but little from those in which we commenced the twentieth. The War, which has been the cause of so many hopes and fears for libraries and librarians, still drags its disastrous length across the world, thwarting and stifling all those activities for the advancement of mankind of which libraries are part, but the specific attacks upon educational institutions of all kinds have lost their original force; indeed there has been, as every reader of this magazine knows, a rejuvenesence of educational ideals and energy in spite of the baffling obstacles of the time. In almost every municipality libraries have regained much of their former position, and evidences of development have been many. These have been recorded in our pages regularly month by month, with such criticism from ourselves as the occasions seemed to demand; and in relation to suoh progress THE LIBRARY WORLD has endeavoured to pursue a catholic and progressive policy, examining every new idea frankly, and sympathetically whenever it has been possible to do so. Our pages have been open freely to the expression of all phases of library thought, even in cases where our own views did not coincide with the writers. That policy we shall endeavour to continue, welcoming contributions from all who feel that they have something to say to the profession, in the belief that even impracticable schemes and untenable theories have a value of their own if they cause librarians to think anew in contesting them. It is, at the best, a difficult time for professional journals, and for few more than it is for library journals. Cost of production, the obsession of librarians with definitely war‐work, and the absence of more than half of the permanent workers in libraries, are causes which need no elaboration. The mortality amongst our contributors in the great cause has been considerable, and most painful to us. The fact that in spite of all these difficulties our circulation has steadily increased gives us reason to believe, with all modesty, that THE LIBRARY WORLD plays a definite and useful part on behalf of librarians. In thanking those who have supported us, we can add the assurance that our best efforts shall be expended in promoting and sustaining the interests which the magazine was intended to serve.

[In view of the approaching Conference of the Library Association at Perth, the following note on the Leighton Library may not be inopportune. Dunblane is within an hour's railway journey from Perth and has a magnificent cathedral, founded in the twelfth century, which is well worthy of a visit.]

China has had a long and varied urban history dating back more than 2000 years. Throughout the imperial period (221 BC‐1911 AD), the Chinese dynasties established administrative centres throughout their empire and domestic trade flourished, especially in China's major river basins. As a result, cities of different sizes were exceptionally evenly distributed across the country and most of its citizens were influenced by some kind of urban centre. In fact, even before the mid‐nineteenth century, China had the largest number of city dwellers in the world. But China's bureaucratically‐controlled and evenly‐distributed urban configuration began to change after Britain's conquest of China in the Opium War of 1842 (Whyte and Parish, 1984). Once China's treaty ports like Shanghai, Nanking, Tientsin, and Wuhan were opened to foreign trade by the British, they started to grow disproportionately as thousands of people migrated to these cities, concentrating the country's urban population in the central and coastal areas. Soon, problems like unemployment, crime, prostitution, and drug addiction reached epidemic proportions in China's rapidly expanding cities. Consequently, when the Communists took control of China's government in 1949, they were determined to decentralise the country's urban population, to restrict urban growth, and to purge big cities of the social pathologies which had plagued them since initial contact with the West one hundred years earlier. It is, therefore, interesting to analyse each of the three major periods of China's urbanisation under Communist rule up to 1982, the year of the most recent national population census — that is, 1949 to 1960, 1961 to 1976, and 1977 to 1982 — and to discuss the most salient demographic developments during each of these periods.