Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/472

430 430 CHARLES EDWARD MUD IE, building, the " remainders " are stowed in huge bales, ready for sale or export. These are principally pur- chased by the country circulating libraries, and by shippers to the colonies and British possessions ; and thus the name of Mudie and the well-known yellow label, familiar in every English household is carried wherever the English tongue is spoken. About eighty assistants are employed in the central house alone, without reckoning those engaged in the city and the country branches. The system of leaving books at the subscribers' own homes, recently intro- duced, is becoming more and more popular: five vans go out daily on their respective rounds, and 8000 calls are generally made in the course of the week. Mr. Mudie's services as a public benefactor in the cause of extended education, were some years since publicly recognized by the ratepayers of Westminster, in his election to the London School Board ; and it is to be hoped that his knowledge of the practical use of the boon conferred upon the higher classes by the in- creased facilities of book-hiring, may lead him to urge upon his colleagues the advisability of establishing free circulating libraries for the use of those whose educational guardians they have recently become. The gift of tools is of very little moment to any one, if there is to be no occasion for their use; and in many instances it will be an absolute cruelty to teach children to read, and then to hurl them back on the atrocious literature of slum shops. At present, the fact that London is still without any pretence to a free circu- lating library, or indeed to an absolutely free library of any kind, is doubly disgraceful to our pachyderma- tous local authorities, because several provincial towns have shamed us by a good example. When the