No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps, had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a Member of Parliament.
Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays, make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working man's meeting to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House of Commons itself.
Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary study, their manuscripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.
The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone. Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes, Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the Committee report was the law of the land.