THE CITY ON ITS METTLE.
THERE is a victim,—a collective one,—in the midst of the 1. Metropolis, of whose sufferings the world is cruelly unaware. The Crown thwarts its benevolence. The Registrar-General is its deadly foe. Sir Richard Mayne proclaims it a criminal of the deepest dye. It stinks in the nose of Mr. Edwin Chad- wick. The Home Secretary is in league with its traducers. The Metropolitan Board of Works oppresses it. On the authority of its various foes, the public believe it -to be decay- ing, year by year, to be inhabited only by the refuse of the population, to be, in fact, a new Alsatia, where crimes are ,committed in the ratio of 271 per cent. of the inhabitants, each of whom must have been in prison over three times in his life. That victim,—long-suffering, silent long,—is—the City of London. But a champion has at last leaped forward to its rescue, in the person of its Chamberlain. Doughtier spearsman -never tilted against all comers for a fair lady's honour. The Registrar-General has to bear the brunt of the 'first-encounter. Next comes a deadly combat with the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Him -the City elampiOn is not satisfied with unhorsing, but after fighting him, dismounted, for a full hour or so (by Shrewsbury clock), leaves him as good as decapitated, and his Esquire, the C.B., put to flight with a buffet. Then the warlike Chamberlain remounts, and takes a kind of general career round the field in pursuit of the Home Secretary, as the backer of his late opponents, pelting him with his own false statistics ; after- which he returns to his vantage-ground, and somewhat scorn- fully defies Sir John Thwaites and his myrmidons, addressing, meanwhile, a half-invitation to the M.P. for Westminster to join him in the next pass of arms.
Seriously, however' and difficult as it is to connect the idea of a Lord Mayor and Alderman with that of dumb and injured innocence,—it must be admitted that, in attacking his oppo- nents, Mr. Scott has generally the best of it, and mostly proves his case. It lies indeed almost in a nutshell. The City is tried alternately by two different standards ; for taxing purposes, by the wealth which flows through it to the whole of its day population, numbering over 280,000, and to its daily frequent- ers, averaging over 700,000 • for purposes of civil and criminal statistics, by its night population, of somewhat over 100,000. Mr. Scott has rendered real service in exposing the fallacious- character in many respects of the population returns, e.g., "It would appear from the Census returns that the City of London occupies a very high—nay, the highest place—as regards the efficient cultivation of its soil ; it having a greater number of farmers, in proportion to its acreage, than any other agricul- tural-district in Great Britain On the night of the Census there were, it is true, in the City of London 9 bankers, 10 stock- brokers, and a few merchants ; but, on the other hand, there were found 44 farmers, being at the rate of 1 farmer to every 16 acres. There were also 3 farm bailiffs, 23 gardeners, 6 fishermen, and ene gentle shepherd. One apprentice is also recorded—the last of his race."
The fact is that, to quote brokers (of whom 33 only are returned as sleeping within the City) and apprentices alone, 3,297 of the former carried on business within the City, whilst the City apprentices are "estimated to exceed 3,000," of whom 148 are in the very " establishments where the Census tables were printed." So, again, the " uninhabited " houses. of the City are returned as over 2,000, representing, says Mr. Scott, "an amount of desolation exceeding that which would result if the whole cathedral city of Durham, or county towns of Guildford, or Buckingham, or Dorchester, were divested of every inhabitant." But the fact is that nearly all the houses returned in the Census as uninhabited are treated by fiscal authorities as inhabited, because crowded with inhabi- tants during the day, and consequently assessed to rates and taxes.
The result of this mode of calculation, when the City is only credited with the hundred and odd thousands of small shopkeepers, charwomen, lodgers at inns, paupers, &c., who. sleep within its bounds, and then debited with all the drunken- ness of the nearly 900,000 persons who resort to it day by day, and with all the crimes tried in its Courts, may easily be imagined. Hence the assertion, that it is "unquestionably the most drunken place in theiringdom," or the figures which prove that its criminals are 271 per cent. of its population. Mr. Scott has no difficulty in showing that such figures- involve the exquisite absurdity "that the 170,133 persons engaged commercially, day by day, at their places of business,. and the other persons who daily migrate to the City, forming a total of 728,986 human beings, of average honesty and morality, never commit any criminal act." And he shows, moreover, that, on the contrary, out of 9,641 persons pro- ceeded against on indictment or summarily in the City during 1864, only 2,346 resided in the City, but 7,295 out of it, or- about 1 to 3, the proportion, moreover, being lighter in the City's favour as respects indictable offences. In the whole of his encounter with Sir R. Mayne, indeed, the Chamberlain is- singularly successful, and it is diffioult to doubt, after reading his pages, that in order to give the City a bad name, some- person or other -whom Sir R. Mayne avouches (himself being vouched for in turn by Mr. E. Chadwick) has" arranged" the criminal and economic statistics of the Metropolis without compunction,—omitting "murder" from among the graver offences, in order to include pocket-picking, dressing up calculations of cost by means of convenient omissions, &c. It is after this that, flushed with triumph, Mr. Scott makes a general onslaught on the "judicial statistics" of the Home Office. In the year 1861, we are told, there was one (successful) attempt to commit suicide in the Metropolitan Police District, but there were 190 suicides actually com- mitted. In 1862 the attempts had mieen.(by 32,800 per Cent.)
to 328, the suicides themselves falling to 170. So, by "judicial statistics," Bristol, with a population of 154,093, is credited with 261 indictable crimes ; while Bath, with a population of only 52,528, is credited with 285 such crimes,—the elderly spinsters of Bath being thus 35 per cent, more criminal than the seafaring men and sugar-bakers of Bristol 1 One startling fact, ludicrous no longer, Mr. Scott also points out :— " In the eight years 1858-65 the Coroners return 600 in- quests resulting in verdicts of wilful murder in Middlesex alone, while the Police officials return but 79 within the Same period for the whole Metropolitan District and the City of London." Can it, then, be that during those eight years more . than 65 murderers a year escaped from justice ?
The effectiveness of Mr. Scott's advocacy on behalf of his ancient client is not to be denied. That such an adroit swordsman should have risen up from under the shadow of Gag and Arogog, is enough to make those rub their eyes who are not acquainted already with the ability displayed repeatedly by the Chamberlain, before Committees of the House of Com- mons, and elsewhere. Still "methinks he doth protest too much" rings warningly in one's ears, whilst reading his volume. Is the City really such an Arcadia as he describes, in whioh committals are only 1 in 1,857 of the population, to 1 in 850 for the rest of the metropolis ; the graver offences only 1 in 2,613, 'against 1 in 471; habitual drunkards only 1 in 6,894, against 1 in 705; known thieves and depredators only 1 in 11,368, against 1 in 869 • street-walkers only 1 in 23,143, against 1 in 362? Mr. Scott has in fact here stum- bled into an exktly similar fallacy to those which he demo- lishes. For instance, in order to obtain the number of City -street-walkers, he takes for dividend a figure of population of 648,013, made up of all the night and day residents and half the daily frequenters, and then for divisor the figure of the '-"indicial statistics," which is apparently only that of the -night residents ? But is there a day, an hour in the year, when the City contains no more than the 28 street-walkers with whom it is debited in the returns ?
Putting aside this ,group of fallacies,—too obvious not to have been unintentional,—it must not be overlooked that the argument, that the true population of the City is its day population, applies in a lesser but growing degree, as Mr. Scott himself admits, to all the other central districts of the Metropolis, nay, one may say, to all our larger towns, since in all the practice is growing of sleeping away from the place of business. And if the City is hardly treated when only credited by the Registrar-General with its night residents, has it, on the other hand, really set the example of treating as its own all its day residents ? Have its merchant -princes enjoyed as such the rights of citizenship t Has it sufficed even to be a householder in order to take part in the election of City officers? Mr. 'Scott treats the Metropolitan Board of Works as a feeble parody of popular representative government. Is the election of the Lord Mayor by the Court of Common Hall much better ? Do liverymen and freemen really embody the wealth, influence, intellect, for which Mr. Scott would make the City take credit ? Is it not notorious that City dignities are to this day rejected and despised by those real leaders of English trade and enterprise who daily congregate within its area? Could the City supply one other champion like its Chamberlain ?
But this view of the matter need not be pressed for the moment, —the less so, that an important measure of self- reform is understood to have been undertaken by the Cor- poration. The most noticeable feature in the book, as re- spects the future, is the prospect which it holds out of the City's entering into a comprehensive scheme of municipal government, by developing itself, "reinforced by the repre- sentatives of the Metropolis, so as to possess all necessary powers, privilege, and dignity," into a Central Corporation, -which should bind together the projected Metropolitan Muni-
cipalities of Mr. Mill's Bill. It is not indeed the first time that Mr. Scott has expressed somewhat similar views, and he takes care on the present occasion to warn the reader that -he does not speak "in the name of the Corporation of the City." Still, the putting forth of such opinions, in what must be considered as being substantially an official vindication of -the latter, is an important fact, and affords some hope of a termination to the present disgraceful state of Metropolitan 'no-government. The old Corporation,—but reinvigorated by the admission of new elements from the whole Metropolis, ex- Tanded, and perhaps rebaptized,—is indeed the only antis- factory Central Municipality. Mansion House and Guildhall ibelong morally to the capital at large, and not merely to a
small area of 723 acres within it, and "Milord Maire should be the municipal representative of three millions of his fellow-countrymen, and not merely of a crowd of Liverymen in Common Hall assembled. In the constitution of such a Cen- tral Municipality, no doubt the administrative skill and efficient methods of conducting business which the exclusive posses- sion of municipal institutions in the Metropolis during so many centuries has gradually built up in the City proper, would fairly entitle its representatives of the present genera- tion to an exceptional amount of influence, since the rest of the Metropolis would have to come and learn at their school ; but in the long run its position as a local entity within the Metropolis, and amidst other municipalities, could only be that which Mr. Scott, indeed, is content to claim for it, of first among its peers.
On one point, perhaps, Mr. Scott is hardly bold enough. Much as he dislikes and almost disdains the present Metro- politan Board of Works, he seems to contemplate the per- manent existence of a reformed one, distinct from either local municipalities or a central one. Surely this is impracticable. The Metropolitan Board of Works is, in fact, a Central Muni- cipality, but constituted solely for what may be termed the .2Edility of the Metropolis. Now, two Central Municipalities, like two Kings of Brentford, cannot really co-exist. The one must be absorbed in the other. Mr. Beal's proposal, of turn- ing the Metropolitan Board of Works into a simple Committee of the Central Municipality, is surely the true one ; and means might probably be devised of effecting the change with very slight disturbance of existing interests.
Previous page
