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 LIBRA RY 
 
 OF THE 
 
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 THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT OF THE 
 METROPOLIS. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D., F.S.A., 
 
 Author of. 
 
 A HISTORY OF LONDON," " THE THAMES AND ITS TRIBUTARIES," &C. 
 
 The immense and yearly expanding Metropolis of the 
 British Empire, commonly called London, though the 
 name properly belongs only to the ancient and lillastrious 
 City that dates from the time of the Romans, is a 
 nucleus around which has grown a cono;eries of cities 
 larger than itself. It contains a population about as large 
 as that of the whole of England in the days of 
 Queen Elizabeth, equal to that of Scotland and Hol- 
 land at the present time, double that of Denmark, 
 and almost equal to that of Belgium. Of these four 
 millions of people, soon by natural increase to grow 
 into five, and by the commencement of the twentieth 
 century, in all probability into six millions, only 50,562, 
 according to the census of 1881, enjoy the privileges or 
 the right of municipal self-government. This is a state of 
 things that could not but impress itself as inexpedient and 
 indefensible upon the minds of public men, who took a far- 
 seeing interest in questions of government. More than 
 thirty years ago the subject engaged the attention of the 
 Press and of Parliament, and excited more or less
 
 discussion in legal and municipal circles. Among others, 
 the writer of these pages was so impressed in 1856 
 with the necessity of a reform in a system^ or rather in a 
 want of system, that had nothing to recommend, but very 
 much to condemn it, that he published and submitted to 
 the leading politicians and officials of the day, both in and 
 out of Parliament, the outlines of a scheme of municipal 
 reform and extension to the whole of the Metropolis. 
 
 The question excited but temporary interest ; the 
 government of the day did not feel inclined to meddle with 
 it. No party issues depended upon its settlement, and suc- 
 cessive administrations, engaged in affairs, both foreign and 
 domestic, which they considered to be of more pressing and 
 general concern, adjourned to an indefinite future the 
 solution of a difficulty which most of them considered to be 
 of great, but which none of them considered to be of imme- 
 diate importance. Thus the matter rested in a state of 
 suspended animation until the year 1868, when it was 
 revived by Mr. John Stuart Mill, then member for West- 
 minster, and brought before the House of Commons — 
 somewhat on the lines which I had traced twelve years 
 previously. But the measure, as proposed, proved to be 
 too vast in its possible operation to suit the exigencies of 
 party warftire or the taste of Parliament, and meeting but 
 languid and intermittent support, failed to become law. 
 The subject, however, was not allowed to drop altogether, 
 and various attempts, more or less successful, were pre- 
 viously and subsequently made to remedy some of the evils 
 which a great scheme of municipal government would 
 have obviated. Among them by far the most important 
 was the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of 
 Works, which has satisfactorily performed many of the 
 functions that would otherwise have devolved upon a 
 
 o
 
 3 
 
 Metropolitan Municipality, and to some extent rendered of 
 less urgent necessity the settlement of the greater question 
 of municipal extension, of which it formed a part. 
 
 Ultimately, and not before its time, the subject forced 
 itself upon the attention of the advisers of the Crown, and 
 Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary, introduced 
 into the House of Commons, at the commencement of the 
 session of 1884, a measure known as " The London 
 Government Bill," which has ever since excited, and still 
 continues to excite, an amount of friendly, hostile, and 
 impartial criticism, commensurate with the magnitude of 
 the private and public interests involved in it. Though 
 a ministerial, the Bill is not of necessity a party measure, 
 and relies for support not alone upon the vote of the great 
 and compact parliamentary majority that slavishly does the 
 bidding of the Government, but on that of the Opposition, 
 and of the unattached members on both sides of the House, 
 who act upon the wholesome principle of aiding upon its 
 merits, independently of the character and motives of the 
 members who introduce it, every good measure submitted 
 to their judgment. 
 
 At a first glance the Bill appears to be unobjectionable. It 
 is simplicity itself. Its theory is unassailable. Complete and 
 perfect, it seems to afford no handle for doubt or cavil. 
 Its principle may be defined as that of "kill or cure." The 
 practice which it proposes to follow is that of a physician 
 in charge of a patient labouring under a painful malady, who, 
 having neither skill nor knowledge, inflicts death as the best 
 and sole remedy, and reflects that, after all, no harm will be 
 done, inasmuch as the sick man will leave successors to his 
 estates, but not to his maladies. It would appear that the 
 ancient Corporation of London, in the opinion of Sir 
 William Harcourt, Mr. Gladstone, and their colleagues and
 
 supporters, has not adequately performed its duties, there- 
 fore they have resolved in the public interest to put it to 
 death. The quart bottle of generous old wine is not to 
 their taste, and they consequently think it necessary to 
 dilute it with an indefinite number of gallons of pure or 
 possibly impure water. 
 
 The ministerial measure does not, it is true, propose the 
 abolition of the old Corporation, but it would indubitably 
 lead to that result if the jurisdiction, real or nominal, of 
 the Lord Mayor, were to be shared by the delegates or 
 councillors, whatever they might be called, nominated by the 
 electors of the outlying districts of the Metropolitan area. 
 Many of the boroughs and towns, including one city besides 
 London, which make up the immense aggregate, are larger 
 than Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, 
 Edinburgh, and several other of the great cities of the 
 Empire. They are inhabited by populations of greatly, and 
 in some instances of totally dissimilar manners, sentiments 
 and character ; such for instance, as those of Hackney and 
 Westminster, Chelsea and the Tower Hamlets, which are 
 as widely separated from each other in pubhc spirit and 
 material interests as the people of England and France, or 
 of the Isle of Wio^ht and Nova Scotia. 
 
 The City of London and its Municipality have a noble 
 history. For eight hundred years they have been 
 steady defenders and unflinching supporters of the liberties, 
 national as well as municipal, of the English people, when- 
 ever these were invaded or even threatened by despotic 
 and unconstitutional power — whether attempted by arbitrary 
 monarchs, and sometimes by no less arbitrary Parliaments. 
 Their record forms one of the brightest pages — if not the 
 very brightest — in the chequered history of England ; a 
 record of great deeds — not performed by fitful and un-
 
 connected efforts — but by a continuous and never in- 
 termitted series of struggles in defence and maintenance of 
 the inestimable right of the people to manage their own 
 affairs, and safeguard their own interests. In the per- 
 formance of this great duty the Corporation of London 
 has not only never flinched, but has never been unequal 
 to the demands made upon it — or inadequately and per- 
 functorily acquitted itself of its liabilities to the people of 
 whose will it was alike the exponent and the executant. Its 
 enemies — for like most things and people in this world it 
 has had its enemies — have never been able to alleo'c against 
 it an offence of deeper dye than that of indulging a 
 systematic extravagance in its more than princely hos- 
 pitalities. A charge, it is true, has sometimes been 
 brouo;ht ao-ainst it by the thoup-htless or the malevolent— 
 that it has been dilatory in its action when expedition 
 has been necessary — and that it has not kept itself 
 up to the level of the duties and the reforms required 
 of it. But this charge has ever proved to be baseless when 
 it has been investigated — and any apparent remissness in 
 the work of reform and improvement expected of 
 the City has been tardily acknowledged by its hostile 
 critics to have been due, not so much to the want of will 
 as to the want of power and authority to do what was 
 expected. And when the power has existed the will has 
 invariably gone with it in the history of London, as every 
 one will acknowledo^e who remembers the work of the 
 Corporation within the last dozen years, when, spontaneously, 
 without Parliamentary pressure or any other motive than 
 that of the public good, it has added to the amenity of the 
 Metropolis by securing for the recreation and the health of 
 the toiling multitudes, at large expense, such beautiful 
 sylvan resorts, all within easy access, as Burnham Beeches,
 
 6 
 
 Coulsdon Common, Wanstead Park, West Ham Park, 
 and, noblest of all, Epping Forest, the possession of which 
 by the people would alone suffice to make London the envy 
 of all great cities. 
 
 But the great objection to the proposed measure of the 
 Government, is not so much that it would destroy that 
 which ought not to be destroyed, and. which has not in any 
 degree merited destruction, but that it would replace the 
 good old thing by a new thing — that would not and could 
 not answer its purpose. A single municipality extended 
 over the whole of the mighty area that forty years ago the 
 celebrated French minister, M. Guizot, declared to be not 
 so much a city as a province, not so much a province as a 
 nation, could not adequately and satisfactorily perform the 
 work expected of it. Its very magnitude — and the 
 unacquaintance of its component parts with one another — 
 would inevitably lead to jobbery and corruption, as the 
 experience of other great cities very abundantly proves. 
 We have only to look at the results of municipal govern- 
 ment on a very large scale in Uvo of the greatest cities of 
 the modern world — to be convinced of the fact that towns 
 which are as populous as kingdoms are not as easily 
 governed as smaller communities, and that the greater the 
 area over which municipal authority extends, the less is the 
 authority recognised or felt, and the greater the liability to 
 mismanagement and extravagance on the part of those 
 who have the control of its expenditure, and the adminis- 
 tration of its patronage. We have only to look at the 
 scandalous mismanagement of the municipal affairs of the 
 noble city of New York in the New World, and of the still 
 nobler city of Paris in the Old, to be convinced of the error 
 which the British Government would be guilty of in an 
 evil hour if it created a third municipality, not only rivalling
 
 these two in geographical magnitude, but surpassing them 
 in wealth and population, and in the multifariousness of the 
 interests with which their rulers would have to deal. The 
 corrupt government of New York is the wonder of America; 
 the almost equally corrupt government of Paris is the 
 scandal of France and the curse of its people. The cor- 
 ruption in both cases is the necessary consequence of great 
 delegated powers^ that are not susceptible of adequate 
 control and supervision. The results are all but boundless 
 extravagance in financial management, or, more properly 
 speaking, mismanagement, and the constantly growing in- 
 crease of the public burdens without adequate benefit to the 
 tax-payers. 
 
 If Scotland and Holland, for instance, were erected into 
 one municipality ; if Belgium with its numerous ancient, 
 independent and historical cities, were subjected to the 
 authority of one central civic council, or Parliament, what 
 could be expected of the action of any possible magistracy 
 in charge of interests so vast and complicated, but confusion, 
 incohesion, and mismanagement? The remedy proposed 
 for this metropolis in 1855-6 by the present writer, and 
 brought under the notice of the Government of the day, 
 was not the creation of a huge and unwieldy municipality, 
 but of a federation of smaller and more manageable muni- 
 cipalities — affiliated and federated together on the model 
 presented by the United States of America — each of the 
 parliamentary boroughs to form a municipality, governing 
 itself by its own freely-elected magistracy, with its own 
 Mayor, Aldermen, and Court of Common Council, each of 
 these Mayors to be ex officio a member of a general council 
 under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, to decide upon 
 all matters that concerned the metropolis as a whole. Every 
 argument that at that comparatively remote period was
 
 8 
 
 employed in support of the proposed measure applies with 
 double force at the present time, when each borough com- 
 prised within the scope of the great reform which was 
 contemplated has enormously increased in population, and 
 in consequent wealth and importance. The number of the 
 inhabitants of these vast centres of commercial and intel- 
 lectual activity, according to the census of 1881, stood as 
 follows : — 
 
 City of London 
 
 - 50,562 
 
 Westminster - 
 
 - 229,238 
 
 Marylebone - 
 
 - 498,386 
 
 Chelsea - - - 
 
 - 366,798 
 
 Finsbury 
 
 - 524,952 
 
 Tower Hamlets 
 
 - 439,137 
 
 Lambeth 
 
 - 499,235 
 
 Southwark 
 
 - 221,946 
 
 Hackney 
 
 - 417,233 
 
 Greenwich 
 
 - 207,028 
 
 AVith the exception of the City of London, properly so 
 called, which has gradually ceased to be a residence for its 
 leading inhabitants, not one of the outlying parliamentary 
 boroughs above named contains a population of less\than 
 100,000 souls, while the whole of them contain double, 
 and some of them four or five times that number. The 
 twenty-two following, which form the largest cities and 
 towns of the Empire, of which the least populous, Swansea, 
 contains 100,590, and the most populous, Liverpool, 
 552,508, are each of them governed by its own Mayor and 
 Magistracy — 
 
 Birmingham _ . _ 400,774 
 
 Bradford - . - - 180,459 
 
 Brighton - - - - 128,440 
 Bristol - - - - 206,874
 
 Cork ----- 104,496 
 
 Dublin - - - . 273,282 
 
 Dundee - - - - 140,063 
 
 Edinburah - - - - 228,357 
 Glasgow - - . - 487,985 
 
 Hull ----- 162,194 
 Leeds --..-- 309,119 
 Leicester - - - - 122,367 
 
 Liverpool - _ . - 552,508 
 Manchester - - - - 393,585 
 Newcastle - - - - 145,359 
 Nottingham - - - - 111,648 
 Oldham - - - - 152,513 
 
 Stoke 152,394 
 
 Sunderland - - - - 124,841 
 
 Swansea . . _ _ 100,590 
 
 Wednesbury - - - - 124,437 
 
 Wolverhampton - - - 164,332 
 
 That any ten of these busy and teeming hives of industry, 
 
 the number of the two cities and ei^ht boroughs which 
 
 form in the aggregate the mighty metropolis of Great 
 
 Britain, should be " stumped," pounded, and kneaded 
 
 together in one municipality, would be so monstrous an 
 
 absurdity, that the very idea of it might well make the 
 
 hair of Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, or any other 
 
 practical politician, stand on end. Yet a scheme no less 
 
 preposterous has found favour in the eyes of those ministers, 
 
 and of a considerable portion of their supporters, who 
 
 have been so dazzled by the grandeur of the conception 
 
 as to shut their eyes against its impracticability. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, it is encouraging to see that the 
 people of the several boroughs who are interested in the 
 result are up and stirring to secure for themselves the
 
 10 
 
 rights which the citizens of London proper have enjoyed for 
 so many centuries, that no feeling of jealousy of or hostility 
 to the splendid old Corporation animates them in their 
 efforts ; and that the great desire of each of them is to 
 become in the present what London has been in the past, still 
 is, and it is to be hoped will for ages yet to come continue 
 to be — the home of rational, well-secured self-government, 
 hy the people and for the people. 
 
 
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 Charles Skipper & East, Printers, St. Dunstan's Hill, E.G.
 
 
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