this subject may be estimated by the vast number of
books upon it. The book before us hardly strikes us as the most valuable of these. It is very little more than a reprint of the Local Govern- ment Act, with cross references. There are two points in regard to the Act which force themselves on the reader at once,—one, the immense amount of exceptions and anomalies introduced into the Act by Mr. Ritchie in order to get the Bill through, most im- portant and worst of which, as Mr. Hobhouse rightly says, was the long list of exemptions of towns made county boroughs, which in Lancashire have reduced the county to scattered strips of out- lying deserts dovetailed in and out of the borough oases ; and, second, the incompleteness of the Act from the excision of District Councils on the one side, and the dropping of the transfer of duties
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