TELE VESTRIES AND THE GOVERNMENT.
WE are indebted to the Daily Telegraph for an out- line of the plan by which the Government propose to complete that administrative reconstruction of London which was begun eleven years ago by the creation of the County Council. That something of the kind is necessary has all along been admitted. According to the arrange- ments in force in all the rest of England, County Councils imply District Councils. In every large•area, whether rural or urban, there will be matters which concern the whole and matters which concern the separate parts. If London were governed by the County Council alone this fact would still insist on recognition. The only difference would be that the County Council would divide itself into local committees, and each local committee would devise means for getting help from local experts. As it is, the analogy of the rest of England, and the fact that Vestries and District Boards are already in being, point un- mistakably to local municipalities as the best and easiest road out of the difficulty.
There are two ways in which the object aimed at in the new Bill might be attained. One is to redistribute the powers at present possessed by the County Council and the Vestries at the same time that the Vestries are given enhanced municipal dignity. This was the design at one time attributed to Lord Salisbury. and it was plainly open to one damaging objection. No reasonable person is likely to contend that the distribution of powers be- tween the County Council and the Vestries is incapable of improvement. There are probably some things now done by the County Council which would be better intrusted to the Vestries. There are certainly some things—the paving of the streets, for example—now done by the Vestries which would be better intrusted to the County Council. But to attempt any such redistri- bution at present would at once excite a suspicion that the measure was meant to deal a blow against the County Council. Such an attack would be eagerly welcomed by that miscellaneous crowd which has a permanent quarrel with the Council because London is not a place that can be governed on the cheap. In this way the constructive merits of the Bill would have been wholly lost sight of. It would have been a fight of Council against Vestry. We should have regretted this, not only because it would have diverted attention from the real business in hand, but also because it would have been unfair to the County Council. We are no indis- criminate admirers of the Council. We think that it has done some, and said a great many, unwise things. We are altogether opposed to some of the objects which it has in view. We hold that it has taken upon itself functions which would have been better left to private enterprise, and neglected others which it might with advantage have made its own. But all this is really the fault not of the Council but of those who elect the Council. A body charged with the administra- tion of London has necessarily a very large field of action open to it. Its wisdom will be seen in the choice it makes between many alternative functions. But the principles which ought to determine this choice are just as well known to the electors as they are to their repre- sentatives, and it is the fault of the electors if they do not give effect to their knowledge by voting for the candidates most like-minded with themselves. To find fault with the London County Council is very much like finding fault with the House of Commons. The Spectator has done that often enough in the past, and will do it probably often enough in the future. But the fault-finders do not propose to mend the ways of the House of Commons by lessening its powers. They know that the cause of the mischief is the character given to the House at the last Election, and that the cure for the mischief is to give the House a different character at the next Election. The same rule may be applied to the County Council. A city with more than four million inhabitants will certainly go on governing itself, however much those who dislike its manner of governing may try to prevent it. In London, as in England, there is but one road to good government,—the education of the voter. London will be better administered when Londoners are better instructed.
Fortunately, the Government, if we understand their intentions rightly, propose to confine the coming Bill to what may be called the aggrandisement of the Vestries. Westminster, Kensington, Paddington, Islington, and some five-and-twenty more districts will be created Municipal Corporations, and each will have its own Mayor. Whether in the future some of the powers now exercised by the County Council may not be conveniently trans- ferred to the new municipalities, and whether some of the powers which, in the first instance, will be exercised by the new municipalities may not be conveniently transferred to the County Council, are questions which it will be left to time to answer. What the Bill will aim at will be to make the Vestries better fitted to perform the duties which actually devolve on them. How, it may be asked, will this object be furthered by a mere change of names? We can only submit by way of answer that names very often confer dignity, and that dignity does sometimes induce better men to become candidates for public offices. What we want is to give London a higher standard of municipal patriotism, to get it recognised that municipal work is as much the service of the community as Parliamentary work, that what a Member of the House of Commons does for the whole country that the member of a municipality does for that section of the country in which he is specially in- terested. The promised Bill ought to help on this recognition considerably. If membership of a Municipal Corporation is a more attractive thing than membership of a Vestry, and to be Mayor of Kensington is a more attractive thing than to be simply Chairman of the Ken- sington Vestry, the change must tend to make these offices more coveted. It is true that the only result may be to bring forward more candidates of the pre- sent type. The elections may be more hotly contested without the successful candidates being superior in any particular to the successful candidates under the present system. No doubt this is possible, and there are times when the indifference of Londoners to the way in which they are governed makes us almost despair of improve- ment. But the greater publicity with which the new municipalities will be invested, the rivalry which shall do their work best that may grow up between them and the County Council, the growing sense of the im- portance of municipal administration to the welfare of the community, all point in another and more satis- factory direction. We are not without hope that the Mayoralty of these Corporations may be an object of ambition to the best men in each of the new munici- palities.
Whether the Bill contemplates any change in the method of election in the municipalities we do not know, but we sincerely hope that it does. All experience shows that theelectors of single-membered constituencies take most interest in elections, and that the subdivision of constituencies is the simplest and most automatic method of providing for the representation of minorities. If the Bill is to be a success it should give each elector one vote and one candidate to whom to give it. In that way there will be no room for compromises in which A votes for a candidate of whom he knows nothing because he hopes by so doing to secure B's vote for the candidate for whose return he is working, and we shall be spared the elimina- tion of questions in which one set of electors are interested in order to secure the votes of another set who are not interested in them. No system of election is so useful for the purpose of real politics, whether national or muni- cipal, as one which concentrates each elector's thoughts on the return of one particular candidate. There is then nothing to distract him from the matter in hand. He knows the man for whom he has to vote, and he is not irritated by being asked to vote for a list of men of whom be knows nothing. If the new London municipalities are divided into wards, each returning a single member, we shall feel little doubt of their being composed, in the long run, of the right men.
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