r, being somewhat more than
one-third as large.

(5) The rate of increase is: from 16,478 volumes a year at Boston, to
2,778 at Milwaukee; and in San Francisco, for the coming year none (for
the loss in worn-out volumes will more than equal any probable total of
gifts), none at all.

(6) The number of volumes circulated in a year for each dollar of
salaries paid is in San Francisco more than twice as great as in Boston
or Milwaukee, and decidedly larger than in Chicago or Cincinnati. It may
be added, although the figures are not in this table, that a much more
striking evidence of the stringent economy of the library administration
here is the fact that there is paid at the Boston Public Library in
salaries, in the cataloging department alone, without allowing anything
for printing, nearly as much as the whole of this year's library
appropriation by the city of San Francisco.

(7) Similar comparisons with the six smaller cities listed would give
results generally similar, but showing a still more liberal rate per
head and dollar of expenditure for libraries.

In addition to this exposition of comparative parsimony a feature of it
should be remembered which might easily escape notice: that, while the
money for running expenses is all gone at the end of the year, nearly
all of the allowance above running expenses remains represented by
valuable property. Thus, if the year's allowance for this library had
been $28,000, instead of $18,000, it would not have cost a cent more to
run the library and at the year's end about $10,000 worth of books would
remain added to the permanent property of the city.

Another result of this policy is to prevent printing any catalogue of
the recent additions to the library; so that there is practically no
access, and there will, for the present, continue to be none, even for
the public who own the books, to all additions to this library since
June, 1884, being several thousand titles. It is needless to point out
that if there were to be the hypothesis of an unfriendly purpose
entertained against the library, that purpose would be served as
directly by suppressing the names of books in the library as by
preventing the addition of new ones, or by the replacing of those worn
out.

These brief statements sufficiently show what our city is doing, and
what other cities are doing, for or against public libraries. It is not
within the scope of this paper to inquire after the real reason for th