Ascending from the lowest deliberative unit in the new scheme of local self government one passes from the Parish Council to the District Council. If it can be questioned whether the average villager as yet fully appreciates the gift of power made to him by the legislature in 1894, no such doubt can exist as to those bodies that are a little higher in the deliberative scale, the District Councils. The local parliament in the parish hall may sometimes be unattended by a single cottager. The District Council, if it be not as yet popular, is at least never neglected. Seats on it were from the first objects of local ambition. This is only what might have been expected in an age, a marked feature of which is the quickened interest of all sections of the community in whatever affects the health or comfort of the labouring classes. The District Council, as its name implies, has a more than parochial dignity. Its jurisdiction is practically commensurate with the sphere of the old Rural Sanitary Authority. The relief of pauperism however, forms a first and special care of this body, the members of which are also the Guardians of the Poor. Its place of assembly is the chief small town of the neighbourhood; not indeed the County town, but generally a convenient town where there happens to be a railway station. The District Council has already contracted certain associations of local fashion. The ladies of the country side have entered warmly into its business, and often constitute a majority of its most active members. There is, of course, the complaint of impulsiveness brought against the District Councillors. Thus the domestic idea is regarded by them with more respect than it secured from their predecessors, the Boards of Guardians. Guardians were elected by the plural vote of the larger ratepayers. They had, moreover, to satisfy a property qualification in their own persons. District Councils in theory know nothing of, and in practice are affected little by, such conditions. The ex-officio magistrate, without which no Board of Guardians was complete, is systematically absent from the new District bodies. The personnel of the new Councils, which occupy a place midway between the Parish and the County assemblies, presents a notable contrast to that of the superseded Boards of Guardians. County magistrates are not, in virtue of that office, ordinary members of these bodies, which are almost solely elective. The dignity of the body, however, is well maintained. The chairman of the District Council becomes, in consequence of that position, a County magistrate with powers as plenary as if he were the nominee of the Lord Lieutenant. Sometimes, of course, the chairmen of the District bodies are already magistrates. That is, however, the exception. There now exist in the United Kingdom about a thousand elective magistrates, being chairmen of District Councils. By far the greater part of these are new to their legal responsibilities. A few are working men. One District Council in Northamptonshire is presided over by the master of a small railway station on the Midland line. Another has for its chairman an agricultural labourer; a third is controlled by an ex-policeman; a fourth by one who supports himself on the cultivation of sixteen acres of land. The effect of popular election is not limited to the discharge of those duties connected with pauperism and sanitation that are the primary concern of the District bodies. Assessment committees, and school attendance committees are both drawn from the District Councils. The latter of these, it is generally admitted, have done their work better since they ceased to be composed exclusively of employers of labour, and since they have become representative of industry as well.[27]
The Poor Law, which has been in force during the whole of the Victorian era, was, as scarcely needs to be said, among the earliest achievements of the Reformed Parliament. Bitter and prolonged as was the resistance to portioning out the country afresh for the relief of pauperism instead of congregating the poor of each parish in their own workhouse, the beneficent results of the change have long since been universally admitted. ‘The new Bastilles’ was the name first given to the unions which the Act of 1834 created, by the opponents of the Bill, with a view to excite popular feeling against it. Only the most hardened paupers, who objected on principle to industry of any kind, complained of the modicum of labour exacted from the occupants of the new workhouses. Even these shirkers have become reconciled to some sort of industry. The improvement in the habits of the whole working class was conspicuous and immediate. Thus, as in his History of the period, Mr Molesworth points out,[28] in four unions of the Midlands, there were in 1834, 954 able-bodied paupers. In June 1836 there were only 5. All the rest were in regular work. In the county of Sussex, the most inveterately pauperized in England, there were in 1834, 6,160 paupers. The Act had not been in operation two years before this total was reduced to 124. By 1836 the Act had become operative in twenty-two counties. The average of the reduction of the rates in these was 43½ per cent. The Commissioners of Enquiry, on whose report the new legislation was based, predicted that the application of their principles would restore and improve industry, would create or confirm habits of thrift, would increase the demand for labour as well as the wages of the labourer, and generally would promote the welfare of those who lived by manual toil. The Queen had not ascended her throne when the erewhile opponents of the Measure confessed that these anticipations were already fulfilled. It was not to be expected that bodies so essentially different from the old Boards of Guardians as the District Councils are would administer the Poor Law in the same spirit or on the same principles as their predecessors. Few socio-economical questions of the day have provoked controversy so bitter, or divided skilled and conscientious partizans into such mutually envenomed factions as the conditions on which relief from the rates should be granted to the necessitous poor. The uncompromising advocates of the workhouse test system, compulsory residence, that is, within the workhouse walls, maintain that in this way only can systematic pauperization be avoided, and that so alone will the not uniformly industrious poor realize the stigma of coming upon the rates. On the other hand, it may be argued that in innumerable cases timely charity from the common fund will prevent the utter break up of a needy, but not necessarily indolent home. Paupers, it may be said, who will not work, and who are, therefore, not proper objects of compassion, are never kept by any sense of pride or shame from taking up their quarters in the local union. Thus, may it not be false economy to make absolute destitution and homelessness a preliminary condition of parochial help? On these points, those who differ will never agree. What it is now relevant to point out, is that the administrative methods of the new Councillors have very generally shown a reaction from the more stringent, and less sympathetic policy of the old Boards of Guardians. Thus, the workhouse test is far less often than formerly made the condition of poor relief.
Organization in every department of activity or interest is the most conspicuous movement of the last quarter of this century. Some years must yet elapse before we know the exact point to which the legislation now reviewed has disciplined and stimulated the inhabitants of rural England. The object of the controllers of the vestries that the Parish Meetings have superseded was to keep village administration in the hands of a privileged and comparatively leisured minority. Hence it was not unusual to fix the hour for the vestry meeting at 9 a.m.; when of course the male population would be at work in the fields. Under the Act of 1894 the Parish Councillors are bound to hold their sittings in the evening after the day’s work is done. From a historical point of view this legislation cannot be charged with being revolutionary. The powers which the new bodies have assumed in checking encroachments upon common land and other like offences are indeed considerable. That prerogative is not an innovation. It is rather a revival of the authority which in the old Manor Courts, presided over by the steward of the Manor lord, the freeholders could exercise. Beyond question, the most far-reaching and important change introduced into country life by the new machinery is the infusion of the elective element into the nominated magistracy. This has not yet received the attention it deserves. Under the earlier régime, as has been said, certain guardians had a seat at the Union Board because they were magistrates. Under the existing dispensation certain Justices of the Peace owe their place on the magisterial Bench to the fact of their performing the duties of District Councillors and Guardians of the Poor. The relations between the two positions are thus exactly inverted. That the tendency of this change is to soothe the suspicions once widely prevalent as to the principles on which Justices’ justice was administered does not seem disputable. It has also positively increased the respect in the rural mind for the law itself as the expression of wisdom and equity. The cordiality with which the older magistrates, nominated to the Bench by the Lord Lieutenant, have generally welcomed their popularly chosen colleagues has undoubtedly strengthened this wholesome sentiment. Finally, the same career in the local polity as of old remains practically open to men serving on the Commission of Peace. Where the old J.P. Guardian was a man who did good work on the Union Board, he seldom now is debarred from doing it still. Even when he is locally unpopular, a well-earned reputation of ability or aptitude for affairs is pretty sure to bear down purely personal objections and secure his return to the District Board; a tolerably conclusive proof of the fitness of the parochial constituencies for the measure of autonomy which they have received.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES
General effect of the legislation of 1888 on the English County system. Some analogy between the principles of corporation reform (1835) and County administration reform (1888). But the earlier act did not touch, as the later did, the power of magistrates in Quarter Sessions. Social circumstances, e.g.: the growth of an educated and leisured class of residents in country towns which have made the time ripe for the new legislation, and distributed throughout England a new class of capable local administrators. Contrast between County town life before and since the establishment of County Councils. Social pictures of county supremacy on Sessions days in the old era at hotels and shops. County self government has not destroyed the old County traditions nor deprived the old administrators of their former career. Exact functions of County Councils, and points of administrative communion between them and the old magistrates. Local idiosyncrasies of these Councils, North and South.
The legislation of 1888 has influenced the entire scheme of life in provincial England. The social prestige of the County system, centred in the extra-judicial power of the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, had not been affected prejudicially by the Corporation Reform Act with which, two years before the Queen’s accession, the Whig Ministers in the newly reformed Parliament supplemented the Poor Law changes. The principle underlying the County Council Act of 1888, and before that the Corporation Act of 1835 was the same. Both marked a return to a more ancient but a less exclusive system rather than a sudden introduction of a new. Like the monarchy itself, the borough corporations were in their beginnings genuinely popular. As in the case of the Throne, so in that of the provincial polities; it was the Tudor sovereigns who narrowed and enervated the privileges of their subjects. Under the Plantagenets and throughout the Middle Ages, the corporations were elected by popular constituencies, the freemen of the town. Contracted in their scope under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, these charters of urban freedom were, under the Stuarts, so remodelled as to transfer from the burgesses to the Crown the appointment of municipal officers. Municipal liberty having passed away first, municipal purity gradually followed. The abuses in civic life had at last equalled the corruptions which reduced parliamentary elections to a farce. Within a year of Lord Grey’s Reform Act, the urban scandals became too gross to be ignored longer by a comparatively purified House of Commons. As in the case of the procedure with reference to the Poor Law, so in the business of municipal reform a Commission was appointed to investigate the corporations of the United Kingdom. The national enthusiasm for the men who had carried electoral reform against the House of Lords, against the Duke of Wellington and against the King was soon followed by a Tory reaction. In the hope of regaining for his party some of the popularity which it had lost, Lord John Russell in the summer of 1835 submitted the new measure to the House of Commons. Two millions of Englishmen were affected by the scheme. The then existing municipal bodies had been shown as little to represent the property, the intelligence, even the population of the towns as the unreformed Legislature had reflected the convictions and desires of the Kingdom. Charitable funds, bequeathed by former benefactors for the impartial relief of local want, had by the abuses of years, been diverted wholly from their original purpose. They were dispensed habitually to the political friends of the men who had for the time the upper hand in the affairs of the borough. These moneys seldom mitigated any honest distress; they were squandered in the periodical junketings of the authorities of the township, with the political partizans who were their fellow feasters. Two novelists of our time have drawn famous pictures of the same great nobleman. The original of Disraeli’s ‘Lord Monmouth’ in Coningsby was the Marquis of Hertford, whose henchman, the ‘Mr Rigby’ of the novel, was the John Wilson Croker of real life. Thackeray’s ‘Marquis of Steyne’ in Vanity Fair was the other literary likeness of the same titled original. In real life the Marquis of Hertford, as ‘an honest burgess,’ was a chief member of the Council of Oxford city. The Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, his lordship’s steward, and his confidant in all things were the chief associates of this eminent noble in the control of the municipality of the University town. The Corporation Act of 1835 swept away these scandals, and made municipal government a fairly popular reality. Thenceforward in all corporate boroughs, the Town Council was chosen by resident inhabitants rated to the relief of the poor. Since 1835 the power of the magistrates in boroughs is exercised by the borough bench with an appeal to Quarter Sessions, that is, to the County. The measure did not a little towards re-establishing the popular privileges which had existed before the Tudor encroachments. London was not included in the Act. With that exception, all English towns on the Queen’s accession had for two years been in the enjoyment of self-rule. Cobden is one of the many opponents of caste exclusiveness who have testified to the purity and efficiency of the unpaid magistracy in their functions of County administrators. These persons were of course never responsible to any constituent body. They satisfied the property qualification by the possession of £300 in land, or by the receipt of an income of £100 a year. Notwithstanding the thoroughness of the work done by them on the Quarter Sessions committees for regulating extra-judicial business, they represented no interest except that of the party enjoying political power, the supreme embodiment of which was the Lord Lieutenant of the County.
Meanwhile, there had been great changes in the composition of the residents at, or in the neighbourhood of the chief provincial towns of England. The close of the Crimean War reinforced the class now mentioned by the addition of educated, but not generally wealthy, men, who desired peacefully to spend the residue of their days in districts with which family ties made them familiar or which conveniences of sport or education rendered attractive. The absorbing powers of the capital have progressively increased during recent decades. Opulence and fashion have swollen the great public schools of the country to unmanageable dimensions. Still, to a large percentage of English parents in the upper middle class, Eton and Harrow are not the only two possible schools of the realm; life may be lived as pleasantly, and more economically, in provincial centres like Bedford, Ipswich, Bath, or Cheltenham as within the metropolitan radius. Schools, not less than hotels, have become matters of joint stock enterprise, and of federal proprietorship. The excellent places of teaching which abound in such towns as those just mentioned are pre-eminently a product of the Victorian era. Thus it has come to pass that, at innumerable spots throughout provincial England, during recent years there have settled families, not pretending to historic antiquity or distinction, but still agreeably supplementing the social resources of the County district. Many, perhaps most of these newcomers have served the Queen in peace or war, abroad as well as at home, and are thus likely to have acquired administrative experience of different sorts. These are just the people qualified to relieve their older neighbours, the local squirarchy, in their administrative work. If the machinery for establishing County Councils had been created in the era of the Corporation Reform Act, or during the first half of the present reign, it would have been premature, would at least comparatively have failed, instead of proving, as it has done, a signal success. How this institution works will best be judged by contrasting certain phases of County town life to-day and in the pre-County Council epoch. To visit such a town on a day when the magistrates were sitting at Quarter Sessions was like making an excursion into feudalism. One used to alight at the stable yard of the chief hotel to find no room for one’s horse. The County’s steeds had possession of the best stalls. They could not of course be displaced by, or consort with, the quadrupeds of less considerable riders. Inside the building, the same tale was retold and on every storey illustrated afresh. The apartment normally the coffee room was consecrated to the exclusive use of a select party of County justices who were still at luncheon. The drawing room on the first floor was in the occupation of the women kind of their relatives who were just about to refresh themselves after shopping with a cup of tea. The member of the general public who entered the chief shops of the place on the day devoted to County customers found himself and his patronage at a discount. The tradesman, in civil terms, profoundly regretted his inability to attend to the chance comer until he had satisfied the needs of the County justices’ ladies who were expecting every moment to be called for by their lords from the Sessions House.