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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.

Socially, not less than geographically, the County continues to exist. The wives and daughters of the country gentlemen who are County J.Ps. set the fashion in their neighbourhood and are still regarded as moulded out of a clay slightly superior to that of which their neighbours consist. But as an object of fetish worship the County has in most districts disappeared. The chief linen draper in the town, as he watches the County ladies, in their dilatory fashion, toy with one fabric after another, can scarcely suppress a look of impatience on his well disciplined face. He happens to be, not less than the father and husband of these ladies, himself a member of the new County parliament. He is exercised by a fear lest the special committee of the body on which he is serving should have decided the question of certain alterations in the approach to the local capital in which he is interested, before he has had time to get to the place of meeting. Unconsciously, perhaps, his manner towards the lady relatives of his council-colleague, the squire and magistrate, has lost something of its old deference. Still, the foundations of the social system remain the same. The fusion between classes of which the County Council is the expression rather than the cause has not brought us appreciably nearer the revolution and the Red Republic than had been done by the earlier parliamentary reforms. Here, as in the case of the District bodies, the law of the survival of the fittest is unrepealed, amid the administrative changes of the hour. County magistrates who are specially qualified for County administration are elected to the new Councils in numbers sufficient to leaven these bodies. The service that they performed on the committees of the old Sessions is still discharged by them on the Boards that are of more recent growth. The venue of their exertions is changed. The opportunity of their labour remains the same. Probably the association of County gentry with country town traders widens the view of the squires, acts as an incentive to greater energy, and is actually productive of better work. Certainly, since this machinery has been in operation the intellectual resources of the chief centres of population within the jurisdiction of the County Council have been improved. New art and science museums have come into existence. The people’s parks, which were already known in country towns, are better kept. New reading rooms and libraries have opened their doors.

During the rather more than half a century that elapsed between the Corporations Act of 1835, and the Local Government Act of 1888, the chief reforms effected were in the province of sanitary administration, were mainly due to the efforts of individuals, such as Mr Stansfeld in 1872, and were generally incorporated in the Public Health Act of 1875. These sanitary measures contained the principle on which the area of the United Kingdom was finally redistributed. For the purposes of County Councils, England is mapped out into sixty-one administrative counties. Each of the electoral divisions of which the County consists has a Councillor of its own. The electors are practically almost identical with the parliamentary constituencies. In the case of municipalities inside the County area, the Local Government Board decides the share of representation to which it is entitled, and allots to it on the Council one or more members, as the case may be. In addition to the councillors created by purely popular election, a certain number of aldermen, not to exceed one-fourth of the whole body are chosen by co-optation among the Councillors themselves. The term of Council office is three years. The chairman, however, who is not forbidden to receive a salary, holds his place only for one year. Like the District chairman, the County president too, without satisfying any pecuniary qualification, becomes, by virtue of his office, a County magistrate.²⁹ Like the Council electors, the chairman and the six co-opted aldermen are subject only to the condition of having the County vote. As in parliamentary elections so in County elections, the polling is by ballot. The incidental expenses, however, which are strictly regulated by the number of the constituency, are defrayed, not by the candidate or his friends as in parliamentary competitions, but out of a County fund. The prerogatives of magistrates in whatever appertains to the licensing of public houses, and exercised in Quarter and Special Sessions, are untouched by the new bodies. With that exception, the functions of Quarter Sessions are superseded practically by the Councils. As a consequence, the sessional attendances of the magistrates have largely fallen off; though there still exist many opportunities for joint action between the new Councils and the old Sessions. For instance, the County police is controlled by a committee whose members are selected from the old magistrates and the new Councillors. Again, when the object is to acquire fresh land for popular use; to open or endow local museums or libraries, to establish emigration funds to the Colonies or elsewhere, united action between the two bodies is usual, but not compulsory.

It has been seen already that the Local Government Board at Whitehall looks for the endorsement by the County Council of the Parish Council’s proposal to acquire land for allotments and, with that purpose, to obtain loans from the State purse. Similarly, the borrowing powers for less local objects of the Councils are definitely limited. The consent of the Imperial authority is needed to enable the Council to borrow for permanent works or to issue County stock. The Council’s annual Budget is closely criticized not only in debate by the Councillors themselves, but by the Local Government Board. The property rated to the County Rate which is the security for all loans is inspected periodically by Imperial officers. The accounts are examined by Imperial auditors. Meanwhile, it may be conjectured justly that the considerable remnant of country gentlemen of the old school, that is, the nominated magistrates, who have seats on the new Councils, secure a salutary continuity of administration and expenditure between the new régime and that which preceded it. There is, of course, far more of local variety and of adaptability to the needs of special neighbourhoods in the composition of the Councils than it was ever possible there should be in the personnel of the Quarter Session administrators. This fact would alone make it unsafe, as may be seen by one or two instances, to generalize about these bodies. If in the Midlands, in the Metropolitan shires, and in the South Western counties, power remains to a great extent in the hands of the old order, and only the tenant farmers on a large scale have influence on the Councils, the experience of the northern mining districts and of Wales is very different. Throughout the Principality, as well as on the Gloucester and Monmouth frontier, the small farmers, who are Nonconformists to a man, find themselves, for the first time in their lives, a decisive power in their neighbourhood. The same is the case in Durham. Here the colliers, also for the most part Nonconformists, containing among them many of the finest, most upright, and manly specimens of the English race, practically dominate the Council of the Northern shire.³⁰