TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 161 



91 millions, of which the towns owed nearly 40 millions, the Metropolitan Board 

 18, Maritime Boards 21, and School Boards 4, together 83 out of the 94, and that 

 those debts are rapidly increasing 1 . It is remarkable how many of these numerous 

 administrative bodies have been created, and of these administrative areas have 

 been laid out, and of this immense local debt has been contracted in our own time. 

 I remember when the parish was bond Jide the unit of English administration, 

 with few other bodies besides, except municipal corporations and Courts of County 

 Quarter Sessions, administering the local affairs of the country. The parish then 

 had to maintain its own poor, keep the King's peace and its own, mend its own roads, 

 and repair its own church, after a fashion. It has none of these things to do any 

 longer. Indeed it has recently been wittily proposed to define the parish as a place 

 where a Church-rate can be made, but cannot be levied. I feel satisfied that the 

 first step towards introducing order, economy, and efficiency into this chaotic mass 

 of administrative business, into this labyrinth of administrative areas, into this 

 army — I am afraid, with regard to too large a part, I ought to rather say this mob — 

 of officials, woidd be to establish County Representative Boards, and make the 

 union instead of the parish the unit of English administration, giving it most of 

 the power which Municipal Corporations already enjoy, in addition to that which, 

 and which alone, it was, in our own time, originally created to fulfil — that of ad- 

 ministering legal relief to the poor. I remember well being attacked, during one 

 of my contested elections, as an advocate of centralization and the enemy of local 

 self-government, because I denounced the abuses of Vestry administration and sup- 

 ported the interference of the Central Government with the mismanagement. I 

 answered that I did so because I wished local self-government to be economical and 

 efficient, and therefore strong in the confidence and affection of the people. And 

 this wifi be best secured, I believe, by placing it under a certain amount of central 

 control, in order to maintain unity of principle, not, of course, uniformity of detail, 

 throughout our local administration, so as to protect both minorities from anomalous 

 treatment and exceptional oppression, and posterity from unjust and unwise burdens, 

 at the will of perhaps merely temporary local majorities, and, further, to afford 

 reasonable security to officers engaged in difficult and often necessarily unpopular 

 duties'. I may add, as the justification for empowering the central authority to re- 

 quire very full returns and accounts from the local ones, that this would tend to 

 avert the wastefulness of obliging each local authority in succession to buy much of 

 its experience by its own errors, instead of having a central body to collect infor- 

 mation from each, and afterwards circulate it for the guidance of all. 



I must now conclude, with many apologies for the length at which I have in- 

 truded upon you. But, in truth, some unexpected business has unavoidably engaged 

 much of the time unduly near the day of meeting, which I had destined to the 

 preparation of this address, and I have not had leisure to condense it as I ought 

 and otherwise should. I doubt not that the papers to be read in this Section will 

 make you some amends by their* superiority in terseness, as well as in all other 

 respects. 



Memorandum. 



In the course of the discussion of one of the papers subsequently read to the 

 Section on the question of Population, I took occasion to disavow for Mr. Chadwick, 

 Dr. Farr, and other economists who take our view of the doctrines of Malthus and 

 Mill on this subject, any idea of in any way countenancing improvidence in mar- 

 riage or in any thing else. But as I have issued this Address in a separate form, I 

 think it right to add a few words here in my friends' vindication and my own. 



Under the old Poor Law as it had been for many years administered, children, 

 whether legitimate or illegitimate, gave the parent a generally recognized claim to 

 parochial relief proportioned to their number; and the amount of wages was ex- 

 tensively regulated, not by the action of supply and demand, nor by the amount of 

 work done by the labourer, but simply by the number of his family. Mr. Chadwick 

 drew up for the Commission of Enquiry that remarkable Report which laid the foun- 

 dation of the new Toor Law Act of 1884 — an Act of which it is not too much to say 

 that it arrested, nay, reversed, the tide of improvidence and idleness resulting frorii 



1877. 13 



