Note 18 — IV RURAL LIBRARIES.

The Adult Education Committee may have been justified in laying the blame for this state of things on “the want of foresight of the original promoters of the movement, who assumed that the institutions would appeal only to the artisan classes of the large centres of population”; but they were hardly right in going on to ascribe it more particularly to their mistake in allowing the legislature “to restrict the expenditure of public money to the product of a penny rate.”