CURRENT LITERATURE
SIR- EDWIN CHADWICK. By M. Marston. (L. Parsons. 4s. 6d. net.) No one who has studied the history of Poor Law Reform or read Sir B. W. Richardson's The Health of Nations can doubt that Sir Edwin Chadwick was a driving force of such immense influence at a critical period of English history that he deserves a place in a series of biographies of reformers. He was 'a tactless enthusiast and a trial to colleagues, but he left his mark plainly. Sanitation was more to him than a hobby or a bee in his bonnet ; he saw truly in it the source of great advances,• physical and moral, at a time when industrialism was herding the population into big towns utterly unprepared for them. His work in- that sphere, as in police reform, registration of births, deaths and marriages and elsewhere, has lasted ; and since this book was published we have seen a wench, professor_ delivering a Chadwick Memorial Lecture on a health subject. Nothing would have pleased him more
than this international value set upon his work. He was in
theory a Benthamite individualist and the Poor Law Report of 1832 threw off the last shackles of mediaeval Socialism that oppressed the poor. But he was too masterful, too impatient of folly and ignorance to love liberty for its own sake. When
he became conscious of his power in the land he fell into the snares awating the authoritarian, centralizing hureaucrat
and to a great extent lost his power.- But his -work and fore- sight brought -about immense improvements among those who would not be bullied by him into what was good for them. The author treats his subject well and fairly, giving a good sketch of the man and the Urges. He is less fair perhaps to
others such as Nassau Senior who were not so entirely under Chadwick's influence as he thinks. Mr. Marston's style is not always pleasing, but perhaps we compare him with too high a standard, being prejudiced by the charm and lofty sentiment that Mr. Tom Mackay could bring as historian and teacher to the objects for which Chadwick laboured.
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