L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 237 



found by which from time to time * reasonably well ' shall be measured ? 

 It may be argued that the practical administrator will in fact know at any 

 given time the standard he has to aim at in order to satisfy public opinion, 

 just as the craftsman may point to contemporary taste as the criterion of 

 production. 



Whether it is possible or not to find an acceptable definition of adminis- 

 tration, it will probably be agreed that it expresses itself through two 

 functions, the legislative and the executive. Most of the administrative 

 problems which come within the purview of local government fall in the 

 latter category. 



By a process which is at once historical and natural, the legislative side 

 of administrative activity has remained largely in the hands of the central 

 Government, though it would be to fall into an error which professed 

 experts have not always avoided if the fact were overlooked that in many 

 instances experiments legitimately conducted by local authorities within 

 the powers conferred upon them by Acts of Parliament have often led to 

 new ideas and consequent legislation. Side by side with this distribution 

 of legislative and executive activities, and to a large extent determining it, 

 there has proceeded a fundamental change in the conception of the 

 function of the State in relation to the individual citizen which has marked 

 the last century and, with increasing emphasis, the last quarter of it. 

 The change to which I refer is one from a negative to a positive con- 

 ception of legislative objectives and has profoundly modified the scope 

 and character of local administration. Until a hundred years ago the main 

 interest of government was to restrain men from living evil lives ; since 

 then the intention, however mysterious in operation, has been to help 

 them to live good ones. 



This change has coincided and is no doubt connected with another 

 conception widely developed if not created during the same period, viz. 

 the idea of human progress or the infinite perfectibility of man. A social 

 order designed by those who believe that every day and in every way 

 men are getting better and better may be expected to exhibit fundamental 

 differences from one the main object of which is to postpone as long as 

 possible the coming of inevitable decay. 



The obvious result of this evolution from a negative to a positive view 

 of the function of government has been a vastly increased interference by 

 the State in the goings and comings of the ordinary citizen ; and the 

 problems which form the subject of this paper arise from the steps which 

 have been and are being taken to make this interference effective. The 

 growth in this business of government, as in other businesses, has forced 

 home the need for administrative devolution, with the consequent rise 

 of local government as the machinery through which much of the will 

 of Parliament must be implemented. 



It is no part of this paper to try to trace the process of this devolution, 

 but it is relevant to point out that there have been occasions when the 

 need for defining satisfactorily the respective spheres of the central and 

 the local government has presented itself as an extremely urgent problem, 

 at any rate to the minds of many local administrators. There is little, 

 however, for me to say on this point because the rules according to which 



