TKANSACTIONS Ol'" THE SECTIONS. 



159 



practicable the energy and economy observable in undertakings carried on by inte- 

 rested parties as compared with public bodies, with due security from the unreason- 

 able charges or ruinous and wasteful competition of companies or individuals under- 

 taking for profit works which are" too important to the public, and at the same time 

 too much monopolies in their nature, to be advantageously entrusted unreservedly 

 and for ever to interested parties." 



"When these or other public works of some analogous kind (as gas, docks, piers) 

 thus become the property of the municipality, the expenses become a local charge 

 upon the inhabitants — either wholly borne by those who personally use the supplies 

 or accommodation thus afforded, leaving only so much as may be used for purely 

 public purposes, as, e. g., the gas for street lamps, to be paid out of the rates ; or 

 else chiefly borne by the public, when the payments for what is used by private 

 individuals are regularly supplemented out of the rates, the rates being the security 

 on which the requisite capital had to be raised. 



And this brings me to a subject on which I intend troubling you with a few words, 

 because it is very important, very pressing, andean no longer be considered to partake 

 at all of a party' character ; for the idea of a more consolidated management of local 

 public business in our towns, and still more in our country districts, under the 

 long-established Municipal .Corporations in the former, and under new Coimty 

 Boards of a more or less representative character in the latter, has now been for 

 some years advocated as warmly by Conservatives as by Liberals. And the same 

 happy absence of party character applies to another proposal, not so long pro- 

 minently brought forward, of making the Union the unit of English administration 

 after such an adj ustment of boundaries that it should never trangress those of the 

 county. I rejoice much that this should be so ; for sure I am that to deal at all 

 satisfactorily with the complicated question of local government in England, with 

 its rapidly increasing cost, with its chaotic multitude of administrative bodies, all 

 with their intermixed administrative areas and separate officials, will require all 

 the combined efforts of the most high-minded and enlightened of both political 

 parties. 



In the remarks I am now about to offer, I shall rely mainly on the admirable 

 paper read before the Statistical Society by Captain Craigie, the fruit of much 

 research and ability, both in the collection and arrangement of facts and in the 

 conclusions founded upon them. I must draw upon his admirably arranged tables 

 (most of them laboriously prepared by the collation of several returns, not simply 

 copied from any one) for the facts which I am about to mention. 



