present relations between the central ministerial authorities in London and those representative authorities who now administer the affairs of the towns and counties, and to suggest a possible improvement.

In 1802, after the legislative union of Great Britain with Ireland, the total cost of the civil government of the United Kingdom-the cost, that is, apart from defence and debt charges— was about £8,000,000. Nearly seventy years later, in 1869, the cost was rather less than £17,000,000, although the population and wealth of the nation during that period had much more than doubled. After 1869 came large developments, as democracy expanded. It is worth while to analyse the constituents of the amount of £16,987,945 spent upon civil government in the year 1869. The support of the Royal Family and Royal Household cost £688,662. Courts of Justice, diplomatic salaries and pensions, and other miscellaneous items amounted to £1,887,286. The collection of revenue and the post office cost £6,117,640. The remainder of the total expenditure included public works and buildings, salaries and expenses of public departments, law and justice, very modest grants for education, science and art, colonial, consular, and other foreign services, etc.-a total cost of less than £9,000,000. The salaries and expenses of public departments came to only £1,587,320. The wealth of the country was then, as Gladstone said, ' advancing by leaps and bounds.' No wonder that he thought in 1874 that, if the nation sent him back to power he would be able to abolish altogether the then trifling income tax. Money was fructifying at a prodigious pace in the pockets of the men of business and commerce and of those whose savings supplied the necessary capital for national expansion. One indirect consequence of the extensions of the suffrage in 1867 and 1884 has been an immense increase in the cost of government, while the financial result of the still greater extension of the suffrage in 1920 yet remains to be felt in full force. The present position is conveniently summed up in an article in the Times of August 2, 1922:

'Before the war the Civil Service consisted of 283,000 people, costing £29,500,000, whereas now, excluding Ireland, it consists of 325,000 people who cost, with bonus, £67,500,000. These illuminating figures are given in the latest Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Estimates.'

Parallel to these central developments there have been during the last fifty years great developments in the personnel and cost of the local administrations. At last the unfortunate people, who are neither central nor local officials, but are regarded from one point of view as ' tax-payers,' and from another as ' rate-payers,' are beginning to ask whether the results of government are worth its cost, and whether a self-governing nation needs so much government, or whether there is not something wrong with the thing that it costs so much?

In matters of administration there is always a close connection between efficiency and economy, and between inefficiency and extravagance. The reasons are, mainly, that a man works best when he is most fully occupied throughout his working day, and when he has as much final responsibility as can be safely entrusted to him. This is well understood in the world of commercial business, because in that arena a business which is not efficiently and economically conducted goes down in the competition and ceases to exist. But the departments by which the public business of the nation-central or local-is transacted, differ essentially from commercial establishments in that (1) they have a monopoly of their business and no competition, (2) they are not self-supporting, and have the apparently illimitable resource of taxation at their disposal. They are not, therefore, driven by the struggle for life to make the most of their personnel by full work and division of responsibility.

Supposing that a government department could be let out by tender and contract to a great business firm to do the work for a fixed annual sum, the successful tenderers would begin by dismissing half the existing staff, especially on the higher-paid levels; paying high salaries to a very few able men, dividing responsibility among them, and exacting a very full day's work from all, under pain of dismissal. This would save a good deal of cost, and also make the work more efficient, because the faculties of each man employed would be kept bright and keen by constant use. This cannot, for good reasons, be done. Something else could, however, be done, which would save still larger cost, and be useful for other reasons, although to do it would involve a change in policy, and would mean a turn of the stream of existing tendency. This something is drastic

alteration in the relations between central and local administration, a strong measure of decentralisation, and a large extension of local self-government.

Formerly, the functions and the finance of central and local administering bodies were altogether separate and distinct. Each carried on the work which it had to do under ancient custom or modern legislation and there was very little dual control. The local authorities derived their resources from the rates, supplemented sometimes by market dues and other small rivulets of revenue; the central authorities derived theirs from all other taxes. The functions of the central administration, which cost very little, were almost entirely limited to national defence, national revenue, national trade, central justice, and foreign and colonial affairs. The rest was carried out, with hardly any central control, by the local authorities to whose address most of the legislation was directed. There was no Board of Education, or Local Government Board, or Board of Agriculture, or Ministry of Health, or Ministry of Labour, or other such more or less modern developments of the central institutions.

The money raised by local rates was for long sufficient to meet, without undue pressure upon the rate-payers, all the expenditure imposed upon the local authorities-that was so, at least, after the economic disease (now once more upon us), due to bad poor law, had been cured by legislation and sound practice. Except for poor-law purposes, local authorities had not much to spend money upon beyond the, for long, extremely primitive lighting and paving and drainage and very elementary police of towns, and the upkeep of lesser roads in the rural regions. The main roads, after the middle of the eighteenth century, were mostly turn-pike trusts, and paid for their own maintenance and improvement— like railways. Education was a purely private affair, supported by fees; often by endowments also. The local authorities did their own work in their own way, and met their expenses from their own taxation and had hardly anything to do with central offices in London. The central offices in London were occupied with the army and navy, national trade and revenue, with the colonies or ' plantations,' with foreign relations, central police and prisons and courts of law, and hardly interfered at all in the work of urban corporations, or of the magistrates who carried out county business at Quarter Sessions. The total sphere of

government in English national life was smaller by far than now, and much less centralised. A given piece of work was done either by a local body or by a central department: it was not, as so much is now, subject to a dual control, and financed from dual

sources.

This system, whatever its practical imperfections, was in accordance with the true idea of a federal constitution, viz., that there should be a clear distinction between the spheres of national and provincial administration. It was a heritage from the days when people in every locality managed their own affairs, while the business of the king was to defend the realm, maintain internal peace, and to provide courts of law for the trial of the greater offenders, and the decision of legal rights, and, with the assent of representatives of the cities and counties, to raise revenue enough for these purposes and pass general and special legislation. We have departed very far from this system, in the direction of increase of central or national powers and action, and diminution of provincial liberties. The question now is whether, on a higher plane of the ascending spiral, we should not, on general principles of economy and efficiency, decrease central and increase provincial power and action. It may also be asked whether the best defence against a central socialism is not to re-create, upon new and strong foundations, provincial liberty and self-government. The Roman tyrant desired that all his enemies had a single head to cut off with one blow. So the modern socialist desires that all power should be concentrated in a central machine which he can hope to master or exploit. If he had to conquer one free city or county after another, his success would not be so spectacular or possible and the process tedious. It is easy for a centralised Bolshevism to succeed to a centralised Czardom.

Various causes contributed to the break-down, on many sides, of the old, clearly demarcated system. For want of a general and representative system the old local authorities were not equal to their task, liberally increased by a rise in social ideals, leading to an output of endless social legislation, with accompanying increase in cost. Education is the leading example of this process and is worth some examination in detail. The old notion was that every child should and could have the education, if any, which its parents were willing and able to pay for. This left much to chance. Some towns and villages had fairly good schools, others

bad or none; this depended upon the religious or philanthropic zeal of the inhabitants, both those living and pious benefactors in the past. It was found, also, that as old rural England largely became an industrial mill, parents and employers were not to be trusted to see to education. Then slowly shaped itself the ideal that every child should have education up to some point in life varying with means and social station, and with what its future work was likely to be. Grants on a modest scale were made by Government in aid of voluntary schools. The great extension of the suffrage in 1867 was followed by the Act of 1870 which established school-boards with rating powers throughout the country, and placed upon them the duty and the cost of seeing that a school was within easy reach of every child. In 1902 the cost of maintenance of the voluntary schools, which before then had been assisted by Government grants only, was transferred from voluntary subscribers to the back of the rate-payer, aided by the same Government grants. This Act also transferred the local administration of the Education Acts from the school-boards to the County or Borough Councils. This last was a real step in the right direction that of consolidating and unifying the powers of local authorities.

The principle, then, has been established, that unpaid-for— but compulsory-elementary education should be placed within the reach of every child. Until recent legislation, however, a ' voluntary school, where, as in a town of some size, other free elementary schools were within easy distance, was allowed to charge small fees to parents. This met the wishes of parents who wished their children to be educated together with others of a slightly superior social status, but yet could not afford, or did not wish, to send them to private or secondary schools. The exception to the general rule satisfied this very natural desire, while it helped the rate-payer just a very little. It has been abolished in deference to a pedantic and unreal equalitarian view, and might, with advantage, be allowed again where local authorities think it desirable. It is precisely the kind of thing in which local authorities, knowing intimately their own region, ought to have a final voice, and not be tied up by Acts of Parliament or regulations of the Board of Education. If one local authority adopted an exception like this, and another did not, there would be no harm, and rather good, in experimental variety.