The Board, therefore, was not a representative body directly elected by the ratepayers or electors of London, but was constructed, on the discredited precedent of the Metropolitan Board of Works, of delegated instead of elected members; and though the people of London were emancipated from the control of trading Water Companies, they got in their place a body over which they can exercise no direct, and therefore very little actual, control.
The new Board was constituted in the spring of 1903, and took over the undertakings of the Water Companies on the 24th of June, 1904, at the cost to the ratepayers of London of not much less than £40,000,000, a sum immensely higher than that at which they could have been acquired many years before.
And inasmuch as the Board can call upon the ratepayers of London to make good any deficiency of income resulting from their management, the unsatisfactory result is the establishment in London of a new indirectly-elected public body vested with enormous financial powers affecting the interests of the ratepayers of London, and yet but little responsible to public control.
The third of the three important Acts, the Education London Act, was passed in 1903, and carried in its bosom possibilities of the most far-reaching benefits to the health and physical welfare of future generations.
By this Act the London School Board was abolished, and its duties transferred to the London County Council, which was constituted the Education Authority for London.
Though, indirectly, the schools of the Board were having considerable effect upon the physical well-being of the rising generation, it cannot be said that the School Board had utilised its vast opportunities for improving the general health. By instruction, by influence, it might have done so much, might have moulded the physical future of generations. But education was always much more in the minds of the Board than health, though the two might well have been considered together, and without health education is of little use.
The Board in their “Final Report” endeavoured to offer an explanation of their inaction.
“It has always been a question how far the Board are authorised to spend public money on the medical care of children. On the one hand suggestions have been made for the inspection of their teeth, and the treatment of cases of anæmic condition and arrested development. On the other hand a legal opinion has been expressed that the Board are not entitled to do anything, or to take any measures except such as spring from the fact that the attendance of the children is compulsory. On this account it has been thought right to take action only in those cases in which on account of contagious disease, it is necessary to exclude children from school.”[186]
Even the sanitary condition of the schools does not appear to have been well looked after.