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generation which will depend on these ordinands for religious instruction, will have in God's time to render a very strict and solemn account.

And this brings me to the second part of my argument, with which space compels me to deal very briefly. Our dispassionate observer, if historical records did not permit him to verify the alleged exceptional purity of some particular breed of cattle, would submit the theory to the test of present experience; he would note in that case whether the present representatives were breeding so truly and exactly to type as to distinguish themselves in this respect from all other breeds. Can Catholicism appeal successfully to this second test? Roman Catholics tell us that, four centuries ago, the half of Western Christendom broke away from the one Infallible Authority on religion and morals. The Anglo-Catholic holds the same theory with slight numerical variations; for him it was rather more than a third of Europe that then broke away. This half (or this third) has remained four centuries in impenitent separation, with what religious and moral result? A Frenchman remarked casually to me the other day, at a Norman table d'hôte at which we found ourselves side by side: "But, then you English are a more religious people than we are!" Anyone who cycles in that country from village to village on Sundays and weekdays will probably come to much the same conclusion, that, if a difference is to be found, it is rather in favour of England. Morals, again, may in certain ways be roughly tested; and here also the difference, however slight, is not in favour of Catholicism.* That Catholicism holds much truth, we must not doubt; and to avoid misunderstanding, let me again testify to the personal character and religious devotion of many whose historical creed is here criticised. Whatever truth that creed contains will certainly survive; and it will emerge all the clearer and purer when its champions have accepted the· ordinary tests of history and experience for their fundamental assumptions.

G. G. COULTON

*I may perhaps be permitted to refer here to pp. 118, 191 of my own book, "Christ, St. Francis and to-day " (Camb. Univ. Press, 1919). I am not aware that the accuracy of the figures there given has been contested.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROBLEMS

The First Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government. Cmd. 2506. 1925.

THE members of the Royal Commission on Local Government which has been sitting since February, 1923, are to be congratulated on having completed in a state of entire unanimity the first stage of their long journey. Those who attended the sittings of the Commission in the Moses Room of the House of Lords, and observed the vigour with which widely different views were expressed, both by the witnesses and the members of the Commission, might have doubted whether any such result was possible, and feared that the weight of a majority report might be impaired by a minority report of almost equal authority. The credit of the unanimity secured belongs to all the members of the Commission, but more particularly to the Earl of Onslow, the chairman, whose complete grasp of the subject and inexhaustible patience must have contributed largely to the happy result.

The Report is a volume of 487 pages and its conclusions are confined to a single topic; the perpetual warfare of the town and country. The first 137 pages, however, are devoted to a truly admirable survey (which we shall probably not be wrong in attributing to Mr. Heseltine, the Secretary) of the whole field of local government outside London, exclusive of the Poor Law. There is no subject on which it is so desirable that the citizen, in his own interests, should be well-informed as the subject of local government, and there is no subject on which he is so ill-informed. The Report should be read by every person who takes any part in local government, if only for the sake of this summary.

Since towns ceased to possess walls, they have had no boundaries. Legislators have sought to restrict, and writers have deplored their growth. Queen Elizabeth, playing for once the part of Mrs. Partington, forbade the erection of houses within three miles of the City gates of London; but the "great wen grew greater; the factory system made the wen epidemic. It is now, in an over-populated country, almost useless to regret the growth of new houses, coupled with the disappearance of old ones.

The aggregation of human beings in a compact space develops special needs, if it is only a need for sewers. Need for corporate protection and for the administration of justice gave birth to boroughs deriving their charter from the king. They flourished, multiplied, and in due course became corrupt and abominable, so that two Municipal Corporation Acts, in 1835 and 1882, were required to cleanse and re-model those that were not rotten beyond hope of redemption. The King in Council still creates boroughs, and 56 have been created since 1888. It is the ambition of every urban area to become a borough, but it is vain to pry into the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, and it is almost as difficult to discover why a town becomes a borough as it is to discover why a commoner becomes a peer. It is certainly not size. Of the 253 boroughs in England and Wales more than a quarter have a population of less than 5,000, and so recently as 1913, Fowey, with a population of 2,168, was constituted a borough for no discoverable reason except a desire to pay a well-deserved compliment to a distinguished literary inhabitant.

The ideal borough should be mellow, dignified, and if the ancient flavour is to be preserved, a little corrupt. The urban district wears a very different complexion. It really is a "wen "; and is born of the Ministry of Health (or its predecessor the Local Government Board) out of epidemics of small-pox, cholera or diphtheria. Its origin was sanitary, but important as sanitation may be, the need to use a common supply of water or gas does not inspire a sense of corporate unity or of civic patriotism. St. Paul boasted that he was a citizen of no mean city. No one has ever boasted of being a citizen of no mean urban district; and if an urban district has ever given birth to a great man, the fact has been carefully concealed. The needs of sanitation are capricious, and the creation of urban districts has been haphazard. Some are really rural rather than urban, and their variations of population are immense. There are 782 altogether, of which 302 have a population of less than 5,000; at the other end of the scale there are five urban districts with a population exceeding 100,000. Carlyle would have called them "monstrous tuberosities."

In the county, the organization is almost as chaotic. Counties owe their formation to many causes, of which their suitability as a unit for the treatment of tuberculosis or the control of higher

education was not one. Omitting the Scilly Isles, which are only a county pour rire, we find one county with a population of less than 20,000, fourteen with a population of less than 100,000, and four with a population of over a million. Statesmanship is overtaxed to find a charter of government which is equally suitable for Lancashire, with its population of 1,746,418, and Rutland with its population of 18,368; but this was the task to which old historical county associations committed the framers of the Local Government Act, 1888.

Rural districts, the sanitary brethren of the urban districts, are outside the scope of this survey. There are 663 of them: one of them has a population of five; five have a population of under 500; five with populations exceeding 50,000 are clearly miscalled. The rural parish unit is hardly less anomalous it varies from a single household to over 10,000 persons.

Statistics built on these anomalies are founded on the sand, and generalisations, though necessary to brevity, are written with the consciousness that they are more than usually subject to exception. On the main fact, however, the steady, increasing and remorseless erosion of the country by the town, statistics are scarcely necessary. In 1881 the rural dwellers numbered 32 out of every hundred of the population; in 1921, they numbered only 21. This erosion produced little warfare till 1888. Before that time the Justices in Quarter Sessions had for centuries administered in the counties a paternal and oligarchic jurisdiction, not only over matters of justice, but over such administrative questions as the maintenance of main roads and bridges, and the control of the county police. There was little clash of jurisdiction between town and country. The parish was almost as much the administrative unit as the county, and to it was entrusted the responsibility for elementary education. The justices performed their duties with efficiency and economy, and no one really disliked them except Mr. Henry Labouchere. The Government, however, thought the counties wanted more government, and that the justices were not sufficiently democratic; and so county councils were born.

The framers of the Act of 1888 had a great, though a limited, opportunity. A Napoleon would have-a Mussolini might have— completely removed all the old landmarks, and created new territorial units of approximately equal size. This was not

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possible in 1888; but, subject to that limitation, the Government evolved a noble plan. Their Bill subjected the whole country with few exceptions, to county government, and set up a unit of government well fitted, except in a few very small counties, as respects area, population and wealth, for the purposes for which it was designed. If they had had the courage to adhere to their plan, most of the discords which have vexed local government since then would have been avoided. Ten large towns, each with a population of over 150,000, were alone exempted from the sway of the county council, perhaps for the reason that the inclusion of these large urban areas would have swamped the rural electorate.

Most evils which affect the body politic may be traced to a few lines in an Act of Parliament, and the genealogy of the discord in local government is unmistakable. The municipalities, always jealous of their independence, were suspicious of the newly-created power, and claimed to stand aloof; and the Government made one of those unhappy and all too common concessions which, while they facilitate the passage of a Bill, go far to destroy its utility. The population unit of 150,000 which secured independence to a urban area was divided by three; and the number of municipalities which, under the title of county boroughs, secured independence was thus multiplied by six. With this concession vanished the idea of a local parliament, and the truncated county council, robbed of its larger urban areas, bore more resemblance, in the more rural counties, to a rural district council than to a parliament. A council for Oxfordshire which excluded Oxford, for Devonshire which excluded Exeter, for Cheshire which excluded Chester, and for Norfolk which excluded Norwich, could scarcely be called a County Council at all.

The mischief did not end here. Parliament, having excluded from the county jurisdiction 61 urban areas which could have contributed most to the resources and the wisdom of the county, contemplated an indefinite continuance of the process, first by providing for the future extension of county boroughs and, secondly, by giving every borough which attained a population of 50,000 a title to put forward a claim to independence. Thus a county, shorn at the outset of territory which it ought to have administered, was in perpetual uncertainty what territory it would have to administer in future. The grant of independence to

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