advisable to appoint a little committee of
visitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
appointment, and recommend the dismissal of all his four hundred
librarians. He would probably try to make the assistantship at L100 a
year or thereabout a sort of local scholarship to be won by competition,
and only the cleaner and caretaker's place would be left to the local
politician. And, of course, our philosopher would stipulate that, apart
from all other expenditure, a sum of at least L200 a year should be set
aside for buying new books.

So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum cost a number of
efficiently equipped libraries throughout the country. Eight thousand
pounds down and L900 a year is about as cheap as a public library can
be. Below that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library.
Above that level, a public library that is not efficient is either
dishonestly or incapably organised or managed, or it is serving too
large a district and needs duplication, or it is trying to do too much.

ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC

It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars or
tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear
an easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate
of those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds varies
greatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if
not always a very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G.K.
Chesterton, a joyous whirl of brush work, appropriately garmented and
crowned. When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort of
radiation convivial. We drink limitless old October from handsome
flagons, and we argue mightily about Pride (his weak point) and the
nature of Deity. A hygienic, attentive, and essentially anaesthetic
Eagle checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlargement of our
Promethean livers.... Chesterton often--but never by any chance Belloc.
Belloc I admire beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisan
viciousness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial dreams. He
never figures, no, not even in the remotest corner, on my ceiling. And
yet the divine artist, by some strange skill that my ignorance of his
technique saves me from the presumption of explaining, does indicate
exactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of