hopeful signs the present Council has given that it understands its primary duty to lie in businesslike administration, not social experiment; and it offers a prospect that some further steps may be taken in the same direction.

It is worth while remembering that in London the Authority whose business it is to demand local taxation, and the Authority whose business it is to raise the money, are not, as is the case with Parliamentary taxation for national purposes, one and the same; they are separate and distinct. When money is required by any of the Imperial administrative departments for a national object-the Army, the Navy, Education, or the Civil Service the ultimate responsibility for each and every demand rests with the whole Government, and that Government is responsible to Parliament, while Parliament itself is, from time to time, brought to the bar of the public opinion of the country. No charge is more unpopular than that of increased taxation, where the purpose is not obvious and popular, no offence more likely to result in the fall of a Ministry. Thus the responsibility of Parliament, and of its executive committee, the Cabinet, to the country, is direct and immediate. But beyond this, in every Government, one of its most powerful and trusted members, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has the special duty of guarding the Treasury in its function of watching over the expenditure of his fellow ministers, and of checking it when it becomes excessive. We have, then, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is responsible to his colleagues in the Cabinet; the Cabinet, which is responsible to Parliament; and Parliament, which is directly responsible to the electors at large. Such are the checks on national expenditure. Whether they are adequate, or whether they are the best possible, is not now the question. They are, at least, substantial, and have on the whole served their purpose in protecting the country from extravagant and wasteful finance.

But no corresponding checks exist in the case of Local Taxation. It is worth while remembering that originally, the parish was the unit of administration. It provided for its own needs, the chief of them being the care of its poor. The overseers, themselves ratepayers, and feeling the burden of rates, both imposed the needful amount and raised it. The money was spent within the circle-a narrow one-which they controlled. Thus there was every inducement to economy; and if, in some cases, the use of a poor-rate was abused, and the rate became unduly high, its controllers at all events could, and did, see that it was devoted to their own objects, and was spent among their own people. There was a tempting ease in

managing

managing this method of raising money. The overseers made their estimate, and assessed the rate, and their own officer levied it. But the facilities offered by this system led to the adoption of the same machinery in raising funds for many purposes other than the poor-rate; till at length, whenever a fresh object was to be attained, or an old object, involving increased expenditure, promoted, it has become the practice to create a special Board for the purpose, invested with power to obtain money by simply issuing its precept to the parishes, which have to raise the required sum without question. The superior Board or Council fixes the amount; the duty of levying the tax passes to the vestries. They have had no voice in the settlement of policy; they cannot criticize, and cannot object. They have no duty but to obey in silence, and to raise the sum required.

One cannot doubt that it is owing, in large measure, to this too facile command of money, and the separation between the responsibility of fixing and that of raising the rates, that the demands of the Central Boards have grown so rapidly. The Metropolitan Board of Works was content with the modest sum of 94,5137., in 1856, the first year of its existence; in 1861 it found that it needed 275,1667.; its successor the County Council in the current year will raise, by rates, well over two millions sterling. The demands of the Metropolitan Asylums Board rose from 173,202/. in 1872 to 625,1227. in 1896. In twenty years the expenditure of the School Board multiplied five-fold, rising from 398,8677. in 1876 to 1,800,000l. in 1896. The Metropolitan Asylums Board has to get the approval of the Local Government Board before it can purchase land, or undertake the building of a new hospital; otherwise its finance is not subject to official control. And the London County Council and the London School Board are subject to no external official criticism or supervision. They have only to issue their precepts, and get the officers of other bodies to collect the money they require.

It seems to us that one essential for the proper and economical government of London in the future is the institution of a strong and independent central financial control-a true 'Treasury,' which could check expenditure and call upon the spending authorities to justify their estimates. We do not here venture to suggest the exact details by which this most desirable object could be attained; but we are strongly of opinion that some such provision should be made part of any London Reform Bill which the Executive Government may propose. It is possible that something might be done in Vol. 187.-No. 373. increasing

T

increasing the powers of the Local Government Board, or perhaps constituting a special London' section of that department, charged specially with watching over, criticizing, and to a certain extent controlling London expenditure. But it may be found that the Finance Committee of the County Council would form the nucleus of an efficient control. Representatives might be added to it from the School Board, the Asylums Board, and the City Corporation (and the other corporations when formed), and the Vestries, and it might have the power to check the accounts of the various Committees; to be required to authorize any proposal for expenditure beyond a limited amount; and to have the budgets of the School Board as well as the County Council submitted to it. But, after all, the Committee is part of the Council. What we desire is a controlling and criticizing body, which to some extent at least is external to the Council, and independent of it.

We have indicated some of the points on which reform of London government seems desirable. If it is said that they are not very large or very striking, we admit fully that this is the case. We do not believe that there is any occasion at present to do anything revolutionary or violent either in the way of destruction or reconstruction. If we have found something to criticize unfavourably in the proceedings of the London County Council in the past, we should be the last to deny that it has placed to its credit a vast amount of useful work, that its administration has on the whole been animated by honesty and public-spirited zeal, and that its members have devoted themselves to their duties with an industry and thoroughness which are in the highest degree praiseworthy. The personnel of the Council has been kept at a creditably high level. The selfadvertising agitators and local busybodies have not been absent; but they have been outweighed by the number of councillors and aldermen of excellent character and position. Many men of high public reputation, and some of real eminence, have found the work of the Council sufficiently attractive to compensate them for the heavy demands it makes on their time and leisure. Without pay or reward, and without any of that traditional glamour which still surrounds membership in the Imperial Assembly of the nation, statesmen, economists, distinguished civil servants, and rising young politicians belonging to both Houses of Parliament, have spent many hours weekly over the prosaic and unexciting business of the Council's Committees. It is in the highest degree desirable that this excellent standard of membership should be maintained, and that no reform of local

local government shall so weaken the Council as to deprive it of all its interest for men of education and standing.

What would happen if a great Progressive majority should be returned to restore the era of hasty experiment and visionary schemes, we do not know. But the last three years have given evidence that the Council is attaining to that soberer sense which is proper to maturity. With the Moderates in power, or with parties almost evenly balanced, there is every reason to hope that the regular administration of the Council, and its attitude towards such great questions as London Water Supply and Street Locomotion, will be marked by judgment and selfcontrol. The County Council must remain large enough, in all senses, to attract the interest of the electors and the services of good men. To turn it back into a sort of superior Metropolitan Board of Works, with its hole-and-corner methods and its absolutely undistinguished membership, would be an inexcusable blunder. Whatever it ought to have been at first, it has now come to play a part in London life which cannot be spared. The old Corporation of the City, which is to be preserved, the new Corporations which are to be created, will leave abundant room for the County Council to act. There is

no other body, elected by popular suffrage, which deals with so many matters of importance to all Londoners. No legislation could be tolerable which deprived it of this position, or aimed at reducing it to mere mediocrity and insignificance. It ought to remain an assembly of weight and dignity, capable of doing serious work, and finding scope for the voluntary energies and legitimate ambitions of men whom their fellow-citizens regard with interest and respect.

ART. XII.—The Liberator.' 1855-97.
6

N October last, at a special meeting of the 'Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control," a presentation was made to Mr. Carvell Williams in recognition of his having completed fifty years of service to the Society. Few similar acknowledgments, we should imagine, have ever been more thoroughly earned. If the late Mr. Edward Miall was the chief founder and for many years the chief inspirer of the Liberation Society, Mr. Carvell Williams appears, ever since he became officially connected with it, which was only three years after its foundation, to have been the chief organizer and director of its operations. And for a long period he ' organized victory.' During the first five-and-twenty years of its existence there were few objects to which the Liberationists seriously addressed themselves which were not either actually secured or materially advanced. And if for a considerable time past the rate of progress has very perceptibly slackened; if the outlook from a Liberationist point of view at the beginning of 1898 is distinctly less cheerful than it was in 1868, in 1878, or even in 1888, no one can allege that the fact is in any degree due to a falling off in the energy and resource with which the Anti-State Church propaganda has been directed from headquarters. Our purpose in the present article is, so far as the limited space at our command will allow, to review the course of the Liberationist movement in such fashion as to illustrate clearly and fairly the strength and weakness of the forces working for it and against it, and the reasons why, during the latter half of its existence, the former must be held to have declined and the latter to have gained in effective power.

However remote our own point of view may be from that occupied by the founders of the Anti-State Church Association in 1844, we readily acknowledge that those who took part in that enterprise went about the making of history in a spirit of sufficient gravity and earnestness. In setting themselves to 'liberate' the Church of England from the burden of its endowments, with what they always maintain to be their unavoidably corrupting and paralyzing consequences in State control, Mr. Miall and many of his early friends and colleagues verily thought that they were doing God service. No one who has the slightest acquaintance with English religious history will suggest that the venerable and learned Dr. Pye-Smith emerged from his peaceful and honoured sphere of work as tutor of the College for the training of Independent ministers at Homerton, to appear on the platform of a new and highly controversial