SANATORY AFFAIRS AND SANATORY PARTIES. YOUR truest conservative is a
parish contractor. Leave the world at his disposal, and the glorious principles of the parish contract, bulwark of the British constitution, would endure for ever. Our venerated institutions and the dust-cart must not be touched. The bill to reform the House of Commons was a great measure, but the bill to reform the sanatory regulation of towns threatens to breed a servile war. We expected a parish revolt, and it comes. The City of London is foremost in deprecating the rude hand of improvement : the City declares by its municipal representatives that it does not need compulsion ; it has been paving and drain- ing might and main. Marylebone comes forth, and the great Daniell calls for "a national party pledged to resist, by every le- gitimate and constitutional means, the innovations attempted by either of the political factions upon the old and justly venerated privileges enjoyed by chartered boroughs and other communities," —namely, to manage their own affairs, to have their own dust- holes and their typhus, their parish church and pestilential church- yard. Divers provincial bodies are rising to the agitation, on the cry of that Satan parish pride. It is a contest between parish privilege and public health ; between the dust-hole interest and science. Sordid as it is in its motives, transparent in its purpose, this resistance is formidable, and it is well to bear in mind the machinery by which it acts.
Let the reader look to the parishes with which he is acquainted. He will there observe a certain number of works, a certain num- ber of busybodies, and a certain number of persons from whom contractors to perform the work are usually selected. There is a sewer to be made, and Mr. So-and-so usually has the contract for sewers. Water is required in the houses: there is the water- company of the borough or the district. There is a dust-hole in every house : Mr. Such-a-one contracts to remove the dust. And so on with the other parish works. Now the principal or most active shareholders of the water-company, the dust-contractor, and the other contractors, live in the parish ; they are sometimes parish-busybodies, at all events they are intimately acquainted with the great personages who manage parish affairs; they are customers to the baker, the butcher, the glazier, who sit in the Vestry or Town-Council; they employ the attorney who is town- clerk or clerk to the Magistrates. In various ways such persons can reciprocate patronage. It needs, therefore, no express con- spiracy to make them act together. They may ease their con- science by an honest fulfilment of their contracts with the parish —yet there is no honesty, they aver, without the utmost vigi- lance—but at all events they do their duty to themselves. Per- sons of this class are in habits of incessant intercommunication ; to each other, they are "the parish." It is in their worship that the busybodies see their own importance reflected. There is therefore in all localities a body, more or less compact, more or less stable in its component parts, consisting of busybodies, parish lawyers and paid officers, and contractors : they are bound toge- ther by all the ties of mutual importance and self-interest; they trade in the service of the parish. Now the interests of all these bodies and their immediate friends are no doubt seriously menaced by Lord Morpeth's bill ; but more seriously in appearance than in reality. A little reflection will show, we think, that while union among political leaders may disarm the influence of this party, slight concessions may dis- arm their fears. In no district is parish work satisfactorily performed. The drains are constantly clogged, especially at the most inopportune season—hot weather ; the water is insufficient ; the paving is perhaps fair in the main streets, but the surface of the parish is not constructed as a whole, with reference not to the convenience of the parish " dons " in the chief streets but to the running-off of surface water; the parish and the contractor of scavenging are perpetually at odds about what shall be done with mud-heaps, snow, and other noisome obstacles, precisely when those obstacles are at their worst. Parish officers and contractors therefore have in few places earned a very satisfactory repute: change of system would seem to imply change of men. Thus the contractor for sewer-building sees in the bill the doom of his annual profits ; the dust-contractor mourns his annihilated dust- heaps ; the water-company, its animated floods. It is not in hu- man nature that they should not be frightened. Now it happens, luckily for them, that the Tory lawyer is clerk to the Magistrates, and the Liberal attorney is town-clerk; Mr. Gaiters, the parish Peel, is always chairman of the Tory Member's election committee ; Mr. Drabs, the parish Lord John Russell, is chairman of the opposite committee ; so that not only will "the parish "—that is the busybodies, contractors, &c.—act together, but it will also act upon the representative chamber of the Legislature: the electioneering staff of each parish is likely enough to send up very threatening reports touching future elections. And as "the parish" always speaks for the innocent inhabitants, and the election-mongers for the constituency, the bill will be terribly threatened by "the country "—a collective term for election-agents and "the parish."
This looks very terrible. But it is not nearly so bad as it seems, if Lord Morpeth and Lord Lincoln, and the "two political factions" so cavalierly designated by indignant Marylebone, really go together. The local election-monc,ovrs can only act in mutual antagonism ; the Tory lawyer and his machinery might use this sanatory bill against Lord Morpeth and his supporters, the Whig lawyer against Lord Lincoln and his supporters : if both are in the scrape, the antagonism will be neutralized, "the country" paralyzed ; so that honest folks will be able to receive what Lord Morpeth and Lord Lincoln mean for them. Never was union more desirable or likely to be more efficacious.
But, we say, the fears of "the parish" might be allayed by a few timely words. Not only must sewers be built, dust removed, and water supplied, under any administration, but even a greater amount of business than ever will be done. And of course there will be no malicious intention to exclude resident tradesmen from profiting by the work in their own districts. They must only do it better. If we understand Lord Morpeth's bill, it is a mistake to imagine that even the busybodies will be deposed, or will lose their vested rights of self-importance : on the contrary, they will be reconstituted under another name. It will be the office of the central body to supervise, stimulate, elevate to an uniform and a higher standard of activity and good management ; the administration of details, the control of funds, the profit, will still be local. "The parish" will still exist ; only the inhabitants, the people, will have a new power of appeal to a supervising body in order to keep "the parish" to its duty.
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