William McCullagh Torrens

“ Once entered on the illimitable field of money-making enterprise, the temptation to mortgage the resources of the future would be irresistible, whenever plausible invention or the glittering promise of unprecedented profit should happen to mislead the majority for the time being. For public trustees it is bad enough to compete with private capitalists; to take over their investment and goodwill and risk, without the preservative check of direct self-interest, is infinitely worse. ”

“ It is no secret that Parliament begins to think central authority has quite enough to do, and quite enough of power to do it. What is really wanted is the like local authority in each of of our ten metropolitan towns to that which exists in each of the other great cities of the kingdom. ”

“ But they saw no reason why the benefit of municipal institutions should not be extended to the rest of the metropolis by its division into districts, each possessing a corporate government of its own.
Here, then, is the impartial and deliberate judgment of a Commission consisting of one of the best judges who ever sat on the common law bench, and two of the most respected ministers who ever held the seals of Secretary of State; men thoroughly read in the constitutional history of their country, and thoroughly versed in the administration of its affairs. ”

“ Berkeley House has not been proof against the pitiless gusts of scandal that intermittently sweep over society, maiming reputations that seemed to have strength of stem and depth of root enough to withstand them while passing harmlessly over the willows that offer no resistance to their rage. ”

“ We further suggest the creation of a Metropolitan Board of Works, to be composed of a very limited number of members, deputed to it from the council of each metropolitan municipal body, including that of the City; and that the management of the public works in which all have a common interest should be conducted by this body; and we recommend the proceeds of the coal tax be transferred to its administration: that the Board of Works should be empowered to levy a rate upon the entire metropolis for any improvement of general utility, within a certain poundage, to be fixed by Act of Parliament. ”

“ A popular assembly that has only a little work to do tries to transact public business by making speeches, the most ineffective way in which public business can be done. The parochial area is too small for the public to take an interest in what is being done. There is a good deal to be said for having only one municipality for the whole metropolis. But the business to be entrusted to their management would be too great, and it would give them the control of too large an amount of revenue, and it would be useless to attempt to obtain the consent of the House to such a measure. ”

“ If all the coal-wharves on the river were taken over by the Home Office, or all the private banks bought up by the Exchequer, or all the bakeries by the Local Government Board, it may be clearly shown that the stupid and brutish inhabitants of London would be benefited by a dead saving of two shillings and a penny a chaldron, half a farthing a loaf, and a sixteenth per cent, gain on discount or deposit. ”

“ Authentic history furnishes no parallel to the increase of wealth and population in the valley of the Thames during the present century. The metropolis has never been recognized in law as one town, and its boundaries have never been fixed by enactment or custom. In every direction outside the City gates, dwellings, at first sparsely, then thickly, and at last densely, have risen up, until the parishes "without the walls" and "in the fields" have become as fully peopled as Bishopsgate or Eastcheap. ”

“ A metropolitan city, however, requires for its own local purposes municipal institutions not less than other towns. Their utility is indeed greater, and their want more felt, in a large, populous, opulent, and crowded metropolis, than in a country town of less size, population, and wealth. Each of the seven parliamentary boroughs contains a larger number of inhabited houses and a larger population than the City ”

“ In addition to poor rate, local government rate, police rate, school rate, the towns on Thames-side complain that they pay a heavy rate for gas, and an increasing rate, which they feel to be unjust, for water; and they have come by degrees to comprehend that without some permanent local authority responsible to them and armed with power, if not to control at least sufficient to arbitrate between them and the water companies, improvement in quality or reduction of price they must look for in vain. ”

“ The select committee on metropolitan supply declare as the result of their investigations that "it is expedient that the supply of water to the metropolis should be placed under the control of some public body which shall represent the interests and command the confidence of the water consumers; and that in the absence of any single municipal body to which these functions could be committed, a water authority of a representative character should be constituted, and that a bill having that object should be introduced at an early date by her Majesty's Government." ”

“ But Parliament itself has not always escaped the imputation of having been made the instrument of men actuated by selfish motives; and just now it does not behove an assembly chosen by ballot and household suffrage, to have its heart too haughty, or its eyes too lofty, when judging of the subordinate bodies to whom has been committed the management of local affairs. Upon the whole they have not neglected their duty; very rarely can it be said that their prominent members have made merchandise of their functions. ”

“ In 1851, civic and suburban London contained 305,933 dwellings, and more than two millions of people with ratable property assessed at £9,964,343 a year. Since then the number of habitations has not, indeed, kept pace with that of property or population, but has increased twenty-five per cent., while these have more than doubled. Such an aggregation of intelligent and active communities, possessed of so much opulence, yet restless with so many wants, nowhere else exists in Christendom. ”

“ Parliament will be quite open to consider the expediency of giving it statutable power, as has been done elsewhere, to go further afield in search of new sources of supply. All such projects, however, were judiciously left to the judgment of the future; and the primary and pressing consideration for us all just now is the proper constitution of the municipal authority whose duty it would be to enforce adequate and punctual service at reasonable rates by the companies so long as they exist, or to buy them out and economically to take their places, if reasonable terms can be agreed upon. ”

“ It is better to have local municipal bodies for the different boroughs, and that the central board should not be troubled with any business but such as is common to the whole. The boroughs offer a medium between the small size of an ordinary parish and the inordinate size of the whole metropolis. I therefore ask you to create municipalities for the parliamentary districts which shall exercise their powers under the Municipal Corporation Act, and concentrate the powers of the vestries. ”

“ We know exactly what this hybrid system of responsibility without power, and power without responsibility, in local affairs comes to. We have seen the experiment tried out thoroughly, and we are now witnessing its results. Guardians of the poor have been gradually but steadily deprived of all power or discretion over the administration of relief; they are reduced to indignity and unimportance. They are representative in nothing any longer but the name ”

“ Representative centralism, thus expanded beyond its natural bounds and proportions, would degenerate into a clumsy and dangerous motive power of functionaryism which it must keep in motion, but which it could have no power to direct or control. The same objection to a great extent applied to any hybrid board formed of delegates from Berkeley House and Guildhall to superintend, for they could not administer, in the true sense of the term, any of the great concerns in which the inhabitants of the metropolis at large are interested. ”

“ Responsibility to Parliament in a body without equal competitor or rival under such circumstances will prove to be the merest sham. The temptation to reckless expenditure will neither be curbed by the shareholding interest of a joint-stock company nor the ratepaying interest of a local corporation, nor the union of both in one, as in Manchester or Birmingham. ”

“ In a civilized community progressive improvements of the greatest and noblest kind are not carried by jostling, underselling, out-bragging, or counter-mining. All the finders and sellers of water did not at once, or by concert, begin, far less complete, their costly contrivances for storage and purification; still less did they simultaneously undertake to raise new capital for the purpose of sinking artesian wells in remote hills, on the chance of deriving therefrom chemically irreproachable sources of supply. ”

“ In the project of a Central Trust for establishing a Government monopoly of water supply to the metropolis, calculations were duly made of all the economies to be affected in stationery, messengers, board-room chairs, wear and tear of bell-pulls, and pensions to decayed clerks by the substitution of three nominees of the Crown for the several boards of directors named by the companies. ”

“ And by way of answer to the obvious consideration that steadily extending wants would soon require the repurchase of land at a higher price, and the replacement, at greater cost, of extra filtering beds, there was the cynical suggestion that when all competition was extinguished, and all sense of joint-stock prudence removed, and the whole community left to the experimental discretion of an official bureau, water rental might be raised, by levying the charge indiscriminately on those who consumed and those who did not consume the article in which Government was invited to do a retail trade. ”

“ Neither was anything done to create new corporations where confessedly they were so much wanted, but six and thirty parishes and unions were deemed worthy instead to elect triennial vestries on a uniform plan, to whom were to be committed the care of paving and lighting, removing nuisances, and, when they chose, watering the streets. No magisterial authority was to be conferred upon them, nor even a superintending control over gas and water supply. ”

“ But this is not wholly true; competition is good for a great deal more than at first sight appears. As between rival vendors offering to lay connecting pipes from rival mains in the same street, competition may not be probable and certainly cannot be profitable; but is there no competition working, without noise or haste or failure, between separate companies renting as tenants at will, contiguous water farms within the metropolitan ambit? Is there no worth in example ”

“ He thought the duty of a loyal and liberal legislator was to follow a good precedent wherever he could find it, and to restore what had been lost by decay or lapse; content to improve rather than eager to invent, to consolidate and elevate rather than startle by some new device, to underpin, enlarge, and copy with improvement rather than subvert to make room for the transcript of some foreign design. ”

“ Its diameter is so great that the persons living at its extremities have few interests in common. The inhabitants of opposite extremities are in general acquainted only with their own quarter, and have no minute knowledge of other parts of the town. Hence, the two first conditions for municipal government would be wanting if the whole of London were placed under a single corporation. The enormous population and the magnitude of the interests under the care of the municipal body would likewise render its administration a work of great difficulty. ”