THECITY PAROCHIAL CHARITIES COMMISSION.
TWO very interesting maps have been recently published with the Parliamentary papers. One accompanies Mr. Firth's Bill for the creation of a Municipality of London, and shows the whole area of the Metropolis, as defined by the Act establishing the Metropolitan Board of Works, with its divisions into the several districts under the respective jurisdictions of the Corporation of London, the Vestries of the more populous parishes, and the District Boards of the less densely crowded parts. The other map forms part of the Report of the City Parochial Charities' Commission, and shows the City proper divided into its several civil and ecclesiastical parishes. These maps are of themselves a history of the growth of London, and bring home to us what we all know, but know in an unfruitful way,—the startling contrast between the narrow bounds of the ancient City and the wide-stretching area of modem London, on the one hand, and between the present and former condition of the older district, on the other. In the first place, in point of size, the City proper comprises a space of about one square mile, or not quite 700 acres,—an area much smaller than Wimbledon Common or Richmond Park. The Metropolis stretches from Plumstead on the east to Hammersmith and Putney on the west, a distance of some fourteen miles ; and from Islington on the north to Penge on the south,—eleven or twelve miles. Nor, in fact, does this larger area comprise the whole of London. Suburbs such as Richmond, Surbiton, and Croydon are, to all intents and pur- poses, part of the capital, pouring in daily their quota of workers to the central districts. Again, in point of popula- tion, the City proper is estimated on Mr. Firth's map to contain 70,000 souls, being a reduction of 8,250 on the last Census. The population of the whole Metropolis reaches, according to the same estimate, the enormous total of 3,664,150. The population of the Metropolis is, it is unnecessary to say, rapidly increasing ; that of the City is as rapidly decreasing. In 1851, the City contained 132,434 souls ; in 1861, 116,162 ; and in 1871, 78,250. As we have seen, Mr. Firth now esti- mates it at 70,000, and this seems a very moderate deduction, compared with the decrease of previous decades. The reason is, of course, obvious. The City is the centre of commercial London, and so valuable is every inch of ground, that people cannot afford to live there, while the competition for some stand-point for business purposes becomes keener every year. Every year, too, railway communication between the centre and the suburbs improves, and greater facilities are afforded for coming in and out to the work of the day, the consequence being that London is now left at night and in leisure-hours in the almost exclusive occupation of a few care-takers. while the population which carries on the trade and industry of the City spends the domestic and recuperative half of its life within some part of a circumference described by a radius of about fifteen miles.
But the contrast between the City and the Metropolis, as they at present exist, is not more startling than that between the former and present condition of the City. That it must for a long time have comprised the bulk of the population of London, and must, in fact, have been most densely peopled, is obvious from the enormous number of parishes into which it is divided. The Commissioners, whose Report has just been published, enumerate 109 civil parishes, in each of which the parochial machinery of vestry clerk, churchwardens, overseers, and other parish officers is still kept up, and each of which formerly possessed its church. After the Fire of London, cer- tain parishes where churches had been burned were united for ecclesiastical purposes, and it may probably be correctly assumed that the first diminution in the population of the City took place at this time, the wider and more airy streets which were formed after the fire accommodating fewer people than the crowded lanes and alleys previously existing. From this time the tendency seems (to judge from the diminution of churches alone) to have been steadily in the same direction, various Acts of Parliament sanctioning the union of benefices being passed from time to time, until the number of ecclesiastical parishes has been reduced to sixty, as compared with one hundred and nine civil districts. The area of some of the original parishes, it may well be imagined, was extremely small, especially in the heart of the City. Thus, the Bank of England extends into three parishes, and one of them, St. Christopher Le Stock, comprises nothing but its share of the Bank, except a frag- ment of the Royal Exchange, together with the triangular space in its front, and apparently minute corners of some of the houses on the west side of Princes Street. The Mansion House, again, occupies nearly a quarter of St. Mary Woolchurch Haw ; the Cannon Street Station and Hotel absorb the greater part of Allhallows the Great and St. Mary Bothaw ; and the General Post Office, three-quarters of St. Anne and St. Agnes. It will not surprise any one to hear that the population of the latter parish has dropped from 459 in 1851, to 229 in 1871 ; while that of Allhallows the Great has sunk from 700 to 187 in the same period.
In a district like the City, which for centuries has been the centre of the commerce and of much of the wealth of the country, and which must have possessed a densely-crowded population, and therefore at least an average number of poor, it is not surprising to find that numerous bequests and gifts have from time to time been made for charitable purposes,—indeed, it would have spoken ill for the piety of her children had London not been thus endowed. In fact, no complaint of illiberality can be made. From the Return prepared by the Charity Commissioners a few years ago, it appears that there are about 13,000 distinct charitable foundations in connection with the City parishes. The objects of these, it may well be supposed, are very various, comprising education, apprenticing and advancement of the young, the support of almshouses, their inmates, and pensioners, the distri- bution of articles in kind, the distribution of money, the general care of the poor, and Church purposes of one kind or another. Further, there is a very large section of the charit- able funds of the City the special object of which cannot now be ascertained, and which are, therefore, alleged to be simply held for the general benefit of the particular parish in which they exist.
Had the value of this large mass of charitable property been stationary, it would still, owing to the remarkable decrease of the population, have become to a great extent uselesss. But the peculiarity of the situation is enhanced by the fact that the same causes which have reduced the population have enor- mously increased the value of the charities. The trust pro- perty consists in many cases of houses in the City itself. Instead of returning an ordinary rental for purposes of resi- dence, property of this description now yields a fancy price for the purpose of warehouse or office accommodation. Thus, while the persons to be benefited by the charities have been fast vanish- ing, the charitable funds themselves have been increasing and accumulating to an extent never dreamed of by the original donors. Thus, to take first the grand totals ; while the population of the City has dropped since 1851 from about 132,000 to 70,000, the gross income of the charities has increased between 1865 and 1876—eleven years only—by just one-half, viz., from £67,480 16s. 6d., to £101,385 2s. 8d. It is not surprising that the parish authorities are fairly puzzled to know what to do with their funds. In some parishes, an exciting hunt into the most obscure corners fails to start a single poor person. In many, charitable funds are disposed of by the simple method of paying the poor-rate out of them, a practice which, as the recent Commission observes, may have been defensible when each parish maintained its own poor, but which, now that the poor-rate is a permanent tax, leviable at an equal rate over the whole City, for the relief of the poor not only of the City Union, but (in part) of those outside, amounts simply to a benefaction to the ratepayers, and raises the value of property in the parish, without doing the least appreciable good to any human being. In other cases, again, poor from outside, who are not proper objects of the charity, are relieved; and in many instances, persons in the receipt of relief from the poor-rates participate in the charities, while it is far from infrequent that the same person should be a recipient of charity in two or more parishes. Indeed, it is a matter of the sincerest congratulation that there are so few openings for necessitous persons to establish them- selves in the City; for were it otherwise, there would
be hardly any limit to the pernicious effect of the large charitable doles dispensed or dispensable there. Even as it is, the City, with its diminishing population, com- pares very unfavourably with neighbouring unions and parishes in its returns of pauperism. Again, when we turn to the Charities having an ecclesiastical character, the same diffi- culties and similar misappropriations appear. In more than one parish, charitable funds have been used in redeeming tithes ; wine and biscuits are provided with a liberal hand for the officers of the church and their friends ; and dinners are frequently given to ratepayers, who would hardly be flattered if they were described as proper objects of charity. The Parochial Charities' Commission deals tenderly with this question of dinners, remarking that it is a custom of very ancient observance, and that in some instances special bequests have been made to defray the cost of such feasts. The instance they give, however, of such a bequest does not indicate over- anxiety on the partt of the parish authorities to give effect to the spirit of the ancient bequest. A sum of 5s. was left four hundred years ago to defray the cost of a "love-feast," at which parties at variance should meet and be reconciled. Country air and a well-provided table are thought necessary in the nineteenth century to the healing of discord, and the love-feast now takes the form of a dinner at Richmond, costing about £60, the balance of expense being defrayed out of other charitable funds of the parish. The same parish, the Com- missioners somewhat significantly remark, has not thought it necessary to add anything to the modest bequest of £1 6s. 8d. dedicated " to the maintenance of some godly, virtuous, and well- disposed scholar at the University of Oxford or Cambridge." Perhaps, however, the most startling application of church funds (although we are not sure it is altogether indefensible) took place in the united parishes of St. Vedast and St. Michael- le-Quene, where they were used in defraying the expense of prosecuting the Rector
It is not surprising that the Charity Commissioners should have felt themselves unable to cope with such an extraordi- nary condition of charitable trusts, and should have reported to Parliament that special inquiry and legislation were necessary. Nor is it otherwise than matter of course that the Commissioners, whose Report is just issued (Conservative in politics as many of them are) should have found that the relation between the administering bodies of the charities and the class for whose advantage they were instituted, " is so completely altered, that neither in the strictly literal nor the strictly legal sense can the intentions of the founders generally be carried out ;" and " that it is prac- tically impossible to effect a satisfactory combination or re- arrangement of these charities under the existing system." Under these circumstances, the Commissioners recommend the appointment, in the first instance, of a temporary Executive Commission, to investigate and decide upon the various claims which have been made to the possession of funds freed from any charitable trust,—a subject which the Commissioners deemed too technical for their consideration. This temporary Com- mission, they propose, should also classify the charities under two heads,—eleemosynary and ecclesiastical. The funds of the latter class of charities, they recommend, should bo appor- tioned between the proper wants of the parishes and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the funds of the eleemosy- nary charities between the present trustees and a Board— the establishment of which the Commissioners recom- mend—representative of the Metropolis generally. The surplus paid over to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners under this scheme, the Commissioners advise should be applied for the relief of the spiritual wants of the poorer parishes within the Metropolis at large, while the funds paid over to the newly created Board they propose should also be applied throughout the Metropolis, according to schemes to be prepared by the Board from time to time. In framing these schemes the Board should, the Commissioners think, have power "to alter the destination to which the charitable gifts are, by the terms of the bequest, at present limited ;" but they also think that regard should be had as much as possible to the intentions of the founder, doles being used in aid of hospitals and provident societies, bequests for apprenticeships in advancing technical education, and bequests for schools for the general purposes of education. Where no definite object for charitable funds is found to exist, the Commissioners re- commend that such funds should be employed "in promoting the general benefit of the inhabitants of the Metropolis, e.g., for the preservation of open spaces, establishment of lodging- houses, &c." The schemes of the Board, the Commissioners
think, should be submitted for approval to the Charity Com- missioners, with a final appeal, in case of difference, to the Home Secretary.
Space does not allow us to criticise in detail these recom- mendations of the Commission. On one point all will be agreed. It is matter of course that the benefit of the City Charities must be extended to the whole Metropolis, and it may be questioned whether there should not be some elasticity in the district within which they are to be applied, having in view the constant extension of London. Apart from this re- commendation, the proposals of the Commission appear to be as conservative in their character as the extra-ordinary nature of the case would allow. It seems to us to be matter of doubt whether, when the clearly expressed intentions of a donor or testator cannot be carried out, with regard either to the objects or to the nature of the charity, it is worth while to consider whether this or that application (clearly not being that intended) is more likely to be in consonance with what would be his wishes, could he now express them. It would surely be far more to the taste of a charitably disposed person that his bequest should now be used in the way most beneficial to his neighbours, in the largest sense of the word ; and we should therefore have been disposed to think that the general discretion recommended in the case of charitable funds without any known object might be well extended to the majority of the eleemosynary charities of the City. However, if the terms of the bequest be used as a guide only, and not as a fetter, they may not be useless by way of suggestion to the administering body ; and at all events, the carefully-guarded character of the Commissioners' proposals will gain for them a wider acceptance. The sugges- tions of the Commission for the practical working-out of a scheme of diversion seems in the main well calculated for the purpose ; and it is to be hoped that the present Government will give its early attention to a subject of great interest to Londoners,—one which Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues are exceptionally well fitted to deal with, and in connection with which there are means of conferring great benefits without inflicting hardship upon any one.
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