The first Public Libraries Act in England passed in 1850 chiefly by the effort of William Ewart and is called the Ewart's Act. Like many of the M. P. s who supported the Bill, he was a member of the middle-class Radicals, the enthusiastic social reformers. The object of this paper is to make clear the purposes of their efforts to establish free public libraries throughout the country.
　The Hansard's Parliamentary Debates and the Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries (1849) tell us the roles which M. P. s expected the public libraries to perform. We can group them into education, rational amusement, industrial improvement, literature and the control of the public thoughts. If we examine these roles along with the new problems of the society brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the reform philosophy of the Radicals which owed much to Bentham, it can be said that the public libraries movement was one of the attempts to make over the whole of society in the middle-class image.
　In this paper some related movements of Parliament such as temperance, national education and fine arts are also dealt with.

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　The aim of this thesis is to follow historically “the formation of the modern reading public” in England, especially the early stage of its development. Of course “the formation of the modern reading public” is a very complex phenomenon conditioned by various historical, social and cultural factors. This time, my paper is intended to focus on the conditions of elementary education and the expansion of literacy on the reader's side, which are most foundamental of aforementioned factors.
　In the first chapter, the conditions of mass elementary education (it became a backbone of the emergence of mass reading public) are considered from an educational point of view in a broad sense, which includes the condition of social education. Here it is explained in view of reading public formation that the most popular “Sunday School” spread rapidly to the public, and that self-made reader emerged and came to form a settled center of reading public. In the second chapter, it is observed that “litercy” expanded in a close connection with the spread of elementary education, by examining problems accompanied by validity of the basic data and “ability to read”.
　Through the first and second chapter, it will be made clear that elementary education had been rooted to a considerable extent before the “Elementary Education Act” which was a starting point of public education in England was established in 1870, so that about two thirds of the whole population were literate at the time of the law's official announcement. These two factors, the spread of elementary education and the expansion of literacy which existed from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, were a great “power” towards the emergence of modern reading public, together with the other factors.

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　There was no provision of public library in the “Gakusei of 1872,” the first systematical education law in Japan. In Japan, it appeared for the first time in the Education Act of 1879.
　This paper is an attempt at clarifying the complicated process of establishment of the provision of library in the Education Act.
　This study aims at defining Fujimaro Tanaka’s role in establishment of the provision of library in the Education Act. Tanaka contributed to establishment of the modern educational system in Japan, as the central figure of the educational administration. He was acquainted with educational conditions in America and Europe, and he had a deep understanding of public library in modern society.

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　The Doncept of the school library is composed of two ones—those of the school and of the library. I will think over the latter first and the former, later.
　1. The Concept of the Library
　　Laymen look on a library as a book-house where a number of arranged books are served to people. But library scientists regard it as more than that; the library is a social agency, it has non-book materials also, its materials are arganized, and it is a mediator of communication or information.
　　What on earth is a library? It is a number of books collected with some intention. This intention is a priori inherent in human being: his will to give eternity to certain valuable books—the kernel concept of the library.
　2. The Types of Libraries
　　Some classify libraries by the social system and some by their functions. Much confusion in classifing them is in evidence. We can reconstruct the types of libraries by the notions of national libraries，research libraries，reference libraries, lending libraries, instructive libraries and preservative libraries. I propose that the investigated concept of all these libraries should be called the “meta-library”. School libraries have essentially the function of the instructive libraries, nevertheless other kinds of libraries such as university libraries, college libraries and public libraries have also the same function. Then we must investigate these libraries when we inquire into school libraries.
　　We can also classify libraries by their materials—“ur-libraries”(i.e. libraries that preserve only books), audio-visual libraries and archieves. School libraries have been transformed into instructional material centers that have not only books but audio-visual aids. Can these also be libraries?

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