The Library World Volume 25 Issue 6

OUR readers, to whom we offer New Year greetings, may, we think, face the coming year with as complete a confidence as that which has sustained them in the very difficult years through which they have recently passed. Not that it will be an easy year, because the demand for retrenchment in public expenditure is as insistent as ever, and the March estimates will serve as a debating ground of the fiercest sort. Nevertheless, a change has come over much of public opinion in regard to public libraries; the Press no longer ignores them, and, if much that is written about them is ill‐informed, there is now a disposition to discuss their improvement rather than to condemn them. We are justified in believing that the library has now made its place secure, and the initations and evasions shown in the recalcitrant borough of Marylebone are merely one evidence that places without libraries are uncomfortable in their consciousness of the fact.