LOCAL MANAGEMENT OF LOCAL BUSINESS. • Belfast, 11th Novemberle46. Sea—In
the article on Parliamentary Inefficiency in your last number, you revive a proposal which was made some time ago in the Westminster Review to disburden Parliament of its local business by creating local legis- latures. If you mean only to increase the powers of our eitisting town- municipalities and to create rural ones, I quite agree with you : but farther than this we cannot go. The federal system of the United States has no doubt been tolerably successful, but not more so than our mere centralized one. The only natural division of the United Kingdom into anything like the American States would be into England, Ireland, and Scotland ; and can it, be believed that subordinate Parliaments in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, would work well ? The true remedy for the overworked and consequentlieigm condi- tion of Parliament, is to transfer the local business to a ent of eient state to be created for the purpose, acting under defined laws, an exercising over the municipalities and over railway and other similar business the same supervision, though not the same control, as that exercised by the Poor-law Commission over the Boards of Guardians.
I stated these views in three letters which you published rather more than a year ago, under the title of "A New Department of State" ; and Afterwards at greater length in the Journal of the Dublin Statistical Society, under the title of " The Vocal Business of Parliament."
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