Various

“ If the nuisance is such as to render a dwelling-house unfit for human habitation, the justices may close it until it is rendered fit for that purpose. Disobedience under the order of justices involves a penalty and a daily penalty for every day during which default continues. Private persons may complain to justices in respect of nuisances by which they are personally aggrieved, and if the district council make default in doing their duty, the Local Government Board may authorize any officer of police to institute any necessary proceedings at the cost of the defaulting council. ”

“ Gladstone’s inheritance of doctrine from Peel “was to estimate expenditure liberally, to estimate revenue carefully, to make each year pay its own expenses, and to take care that your charge is not greater than your income.” This method of treatment requires that taxation shall be productive in yield, and that it shall be so elastic as to admit of expansion, a function specially assigned to the income-tax. It may also be said to involve due care in the treatment of the national resources. The reaction of ill-chosen taxes on industry is a hindrance to their productiveness and their growth. ”

“ The county council may appoint any fit person, not being a county alderman or county councillor, to fill the office, and in the case of a county divided into coroners’ districts, may assign him a district. It has been decided, however, that the power hereby conferred does not extend to the appointment of a coroner for a liberty or other franchise who would not under the old law have been appointed by the freeholders. It may be mentioned that though a coroner may have a district assigned to him, he is nevertheless a coroner for the entire county throughout which he has jurisdiction. ”

“ It is forbidden to establish within an urban district without the consent of the council any offensive trade, business or manufacture. With regard to any offensive trade which has been established or may be consented to in any urban district, if it is verified by the medical officer or any two legally qualified medical practitioners, or by any ten inhabitants of the district, to be a nuisance or injurious to health, the urban district council are required to take proceedings before magistrates with a view to the abatement of the nuisance complained of. ”

“ In England, then, two broad classes of industry may be taken up for primary consideration—the textile and the metal. Long after textile and other industries had been flourishing in the leading states of the continent, in the Netherlands, Flanders and France, England remained, as a whole, an agricultural and pastoral country, content to export her riches in wool, and to import them again, greatly enhanced in value, as clothing. It is not to be understood that there were no manufacturing industries whatever. ”

“ London gained its paramount importance from its favourable geographical position in respect of the rest of England on the one hand and the Continent on the other, and the populous district of the “home counties” owes its existence to that importance; whereas other populous districts have generally grown up at the point where some source of natural wealth, as coal or iron, lay to hand. The great populous area which covers south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, and extends beyond them into Cheshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Nottinghamshire, is not in reality a unit. ”

“ The primitive financial institutions of England centre round the king’s household, or, in other words, the royal economy precedes the national one. Revenue dues collected by the king’s agents, rents, or rather returns of produce, from land, and special levies for emergencies form the elements of the royal income, which gradually acquired greater regularity and consistency. There is, however, little or no evidence of any effective financial organization until we approach the 11th century. ”

“ Very full power is given to appoint committees, which may be either general or special, and to them may be delegated, with or without restrictions or conditions, any of their powers or duties except that of raising money by rate or loan. Power is also given to appoint joint-committees with other county councils in matters in which the two councils are jointly interested, but a joint-committee so appointed must not be confounded with the standing joint-committee of the county council and the quarter sessions, which is a distinct statutory body and is elsewhere referred to. ”

“ The “Waterstones,” or Lower Keuper Sandstones,—forming gentle elevations above the softer marls, and usually charged with an abundant supply of water, which can be reached by wells,—form the site of many towns, such as Birmingham, Warwick and Lichfield, and of very numerous villages. The plain as a whole is fertile and undulating, rich in woods and richer in pasture: the very heart of rural England. Cattle-grazing is the chief farm industry in the west, sheep and horse-rearing in the east ”

“ It is important to observe, however, that an action does not lie against a district council in respect of the failure to repair a highway even at the suit of a person who has thereby been injured. The reason assigned for this doctrine is that the council as highway surveyor stand in the same position as the inhabitants of the parish, against whom such an action would not lie. The district council are, however, liable for any injury caused through negligence on the part of their officers or servants in carrying out the work of repair. ”

“ Until the beginning of the 19th century there existed no other knowledge of the actual area and population of the country but what was given in the vaguest estimates. But there can be little doubt that the population of England and Wales increased very slowly for centuries, owing largely to want of intercommunication, which led to famines, more or less severe—it being a common occurrence that, while one county, with a good harvest, was enjoying abundance, the people of the adjoining one were starving. ”

“ By the Local Government Act of that year the guardians ceased to be the rural sanitary authority. The union was preserved as the rural sanitary district, with this qualification, that if it extended into more than one county it was divided so that no rural district should extend into more than one county. Rural district councillors are elected for each parish in the rural district, and they become by virtue of their office guardians of the poor for the union comprising the district, so that there is now no election of guardians in a rural district. ”

“ The governing body in a borough is the council elected by the burgesses.
The qualification of a burgess has been incidentally mentioned in connexion with that of a county elector, and need not be further noticed. A borough councillor must be qualified in the same manner as a county councillor, and he is disqualified in the same way, with this addition, that a peer or ownership voter is not qualified as such, and that a person is disqualified for being a borough councillor if he is in holy orders or is the regular minister of a Dissenting congregation. ”

“ An alderman must be a councillor or a person qualified to be a councillor. If a councillor is elected he vacates his office of councillor, and thus creates a casual vacancy in the council. In every third year one-half of the whole number of aldermen go out of office, and their places are filled by election, which is conducted by means of voting papers. It will be observed, therefore, that while a county councillor holds office for three years, a county alderman holds office for six. The council may also appoint a vice-chairman who holds office during the term of office of the chairman ”

“ Since the abolition of the Test Acts and the emancipation of the Catholics no Englishman has suffered any civil disability owing to his religion14; and the progress of democracy has given to the great so-called “Free Churches” a political power that rivals that of the Established Church. In the matter of the estimation of their relative strength the main grievance of the Nonconformists is that the law classes as members of the Church of England that enormous floating population which is really conscious of no ecclesiastical allegiance at all. ”

“ They are all similar in the great features of their land-forms, which have been impressed upon them by the prolonged action of atmospheric denudation rather than by the original order and arrangement of the rocks; but each group has its own geological character, which has imparted something of a distinctive individuality to the scenery. Taken as a whole, the Western Division depends for its prosperity on mineral products and manufactures rather than on farming; and the staple of the farmers is live-stock rather than agriculture. ”

“ High on the barren crest of the Pennines, where the rocks yield no mineral wealth, except it be medicinal waters, Harrogate, Buxton and Matlock are types of health resorts, prosperous from their pure air and fine scenery. Across the moors, on the western side of the anticline, the vast and dense population of the Lancashire coal-field is crowded in the manufacturing towns surrounding the great commercial centre, Manchester, which itself stands on the edge of the Triassic plain. ”

“ The prosperity and great population of the Pennine region date from the discovery that pit-coal could smelt iron as well as charcoal; and this source of power once discovered, the people bred in the dales developed a remarkable genius for mechanical invention and commercial enterprise, which revolutionized the economic life of the world and changed England from an agricultural to an industrial country. The staple industry of the district in ancient times was sheep-rearing, and the villages in nearly all the dales carried on a small manufacture of woollen cloth. ”

“ The county council or the council of a county borough is now in every case the local education authority, except that non-county boroughs with a population of over 10,000, and urban districts with a population of over 20,000, may be the local education authorities for elementary education only, but they may relinquish their powers in favour of the county council. For higher education county councils and county boroughs are the sole education authorities, except that non-county boroughs and urban councils are given a concurrent power of levying a rate for higher education not exceeding 1d. ”

“ The industry, changing locality, like many others, in sympathy with the changes in modern conditions, has long been practically extinct in this district. Then, when religious persecution drove many of the industrial population of the west of Europe away from the homes of their birth, they liberally repaid English hospitality by establishing their own arts in the country, and teaching them to the inhabitants. Thus religious liberty formed part of the foundation of England’s industrial greatness. Then came the material agent, machinery propelled by steam. ”

“ In April the gradient is so slight that any temporary fall of pressure to the south of England or any temporary rise of pressure to the north, which would suffice in other months merely to reduce the velocity of the south-westerly wind, is sufficient in that month to reverse the gradient and produce an east wind over the whole country. The liability to east wind in spring is one of the most marked features of the English climate, the effect being naturally most felt on the east coast. ”

“ The land is highest in the west and north, where the rocks also are oldest, most disturbed, and hardest, and the land surface gradually sinks towards the east and south, where the rocks become successively less disturbed, more recent, and softer. The study of the scenery of England and Wales as a whole, or the study of orographical and geological maps of the country, allows a broad distinction to be drawn between the types of land-forms in the west and in the east. ”

“ The coasts are cooler than the centre of the country, but the west coast is much cooler than the east, modified continental conditions prevailing over the North Sea. The natural effect of the heating of the air in summer and the cooling of the air in winter by contact with the land is largely masked in England on account of the strength of the prevailing south-westerly wind carrying oceanic influence into the heart of the country. ”

“ Mid Wales is mainly a pastoral country, and very thinly peopled. A group of artificial lakes, one of them exceeded in area only by Windermere, has been formed in the valley of the Elan, a tributary of the Wye, for the supply of water to Birmingham. The group of heights of South Wales, running on the whole from west to east, marks the outcrops of the Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous strata which lie within a vast syncline of the Silurian rocks. ”

“ China clay from the decomposing granites; tin and copper ore, once abounding at the contacts between the granite and the rocks it pierced, were the former staples of wealth, and the mining largely accounts for the exceptional density of population in Cornwall. Fishing has always been important, the numerous good harbours giving security to fishing-boats; and the fact that this coast is the mildest and almost the sunniest, though by no means the driest, part of Great Britain has led to the establishment of many health 413 resorts, of which Torquay is the chief. ”

“ The highways of England, the old coaching roads, are among the best in the world, being generally of a beautiful smoothness and well maintained; they vary, naturally, in different districts, but in many even the local roads are superior to some main roads in other countries. The supersession of the stage coach by the railway took a vast amount of traffic away from the main roads, but their proper maintenance did not materially suffer; and a larger accession of traffic took place subsequently on the development of the cycle and the motor-vehicle. ”

“ Any statistics of this nature, then, however useful they may be as a general indication, must not be treated as conclusive.
Whatever disputes there may be as to the relative strength of the various churches and sects, there can be no questioning the fact that the dominant religion in England is Protestant Christianity. Protestantism, indeed, since the Act of Settlement in 1689, has been of the essence of the Constitution, the sovereign forfeiting his or her crown ipso facto by acknowledging the authority of the pope, by accepting “the Romish religion,” or by marrying a Roman Catholic ”

“ Even the incumbent of a parish is in law a “corporation sole,” his benefice a freehold; and until the establishment in 1836, by act of parliament, of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (q.v.) nothing could be done to adjust the inequalities in the emoluments of the clergy resulting from the natural rise and fall of the value of property in various parts of the country. Even more extraordinary is the effect of the singular constitution of the church on its discipline. An incumbent, once inducted, can only be disturbed by complicated and extremely costly processes of law ”