THE PARISH COUNCIL BILL. T HE Bill for establishing Parish and
District Councils, brought in on Tuesday by Mr. H. Fowler, is in the main a good Bill ; but it is the Parish side of it which specially interests us, and we confine our remarks here to that. It will not, we may as well say at once, realise any of the secret aspirations of the labourers,—that is to say, it will not raise their wages, which is what they want first of all; it will not give them small holdings; and it will not make them independent either of the parson or the squire. The influence of the latter, indeed, will probably be in- creased, for the Bill will make it better worth his while to keep a hold on his tenants, lest they should, by electing a bad Council, work him wrong. Nor will the Bill in the smallest degree check the emigration to the towns, now so rapid, which depends upon causes unaffected by the Bill,— causes which operate in France and the United States, where rural municipal organisation is complete, as power- fully as in England. And, finally, we cannot see that the dullness of English parochial life, of which so much has been made, and which, of course, exists, will be at all materially removed. The Parish Council will include only a few villagers, from five to fifteen, according to the size of the parish, whose proceedings within the limited range of their authority will not be very interesting; and the Parish Meeting, though it must meet four times a year, will probably be thinly attended, and ftir the most part, except when rates are to be raised, will confirm the proceedings of the Parish Council. The Vestries did not make village life very lively, and we do not see why Parish Meetings should. We do not look forward, in fact, to Utopias, or believe that under any legislation whatever, the attractions of town life and of country life can be fully combined. Parliament might as well decree that air in the cities should smell of meadows or ploughed land, as that life in the villages should be animated and full of interest. Still, if local self-govern- ment in local matters is a good object, which we are far from questioning, the Bill is a good Bill, for it secures it, or at least lays down a foundation upon which it may be built up. It may therefore, and probably will be, popular ; and for the objection that this popularity is discreditable we have no respect whatever. If votes are secured by good Bills, they are secured in the best and most consti- tutional manner. If the Government sees a defect by remedying which it can secure votes, it is at least as much bound to do so as to remedy a defect on which no votes depend. The true charge to make against a Ministry is that of bringing in bad or needless Bills to secure votes, not that of bringing in good or necessary Bills which incidentally will secure them. It is a better objec- tion to contend that the Government is only making promises, for it cannot hope to pass so many Bills in one Session ; but the argument, though final against the whole sheaf of measures, is not final against any one of them. The Government, if its majority endures, will be able to pass one or two, and this Bill may be one of them as well as another. Indeed, we should not be surprised, as the Session advances, to see it creep well in front ; and ultimately find nothing in its way except that wretched Home-rule Bill, which is, of course, an impediment to everything. The Bill, which is entirely confined to rural districts, makes a living entity of the Parish, which we agree with Mr. Fowler and Mr. Goschen is the best unit to take of English rural life. It may not be the "natural" unit as, we think, Sir Rainald Knightley once called it in Parlia- ment; but it is very old, very perfectly known, and, in spite of an ocean of satiric literature, very much respected. Nobody even remembers what Hundred he lives in, and nobody not a pauper cares about his Union, but everybody has some sort of feeling about his Parish. His church is there, and his graveyard, and his local pride, if he has any. 'There is a parochial patriotism still surviving, and young men will kick harder at a football if they think the honour of their parish is involved. That feeling is the vivifying feeling • of corporate life ; and the Government therefore is right in taking the Parish as the unit of self-government. The only obstacles are the variety among parishes, and the occasional boundary bother when a parish has overlapped the boundaries of two or, as occasionally happens, of three counties ; but as two Administrations have declared that they can get over these difficulties, we see no purpose in .dwelling on them. An old lady or two will be horrified to find herself living under the" wrong " taxing authority ; but all will in, say ten years, reconcile themselves to the new geography, perhaps even like it better than the old. The parish being accepted, it remains to govern it, and the Ministerial scheme has the merit of simplicity. The Church is let alone entirely, the ecclesiastical parish remaining precisely where it was. Parishes too small to be considered fully alive—that is, con- taining less than three hundred souls—will be grouped,—an arrangement in which we foresee vast trouble ; but every -civil parish containing above three hundred souls—that is, nine thousand parishes out of fifteen thousand—will elect s Council varying in number from five to fifteen, according to population, and a chairman, and this Council will be the executive body in all the parochial matters defined by the Bill. - It will, for example, own all parochial property, control any local store of drinking-water, provide vestry-rooms, parochial offices, fire-engines and fire-escapes, manage parochial libraries when there are any, regulate public watching, public lighting, and public improvements, and, in short, do everything pretty nearly that a municipality usually does. It will also be the " authority " in any case in which a statute imposes on a local authority an obligation to do, or to inspect, anything whatever. It will, in addition, settle the distribution of allotments, as to which its powers are very extensive. If it wants land to be distributed under the Allotment Act, it has only to ask the Local Government Board for per- mission, and it can take such land, or hire such land, compulsorily, at a price to be fixed by one arbitrator, who in making his award must add nothing for compulsory disturbance. The revenue for all these expenditures is, of course, to be raised by rating ; but as to rating, the Council is not independent. It may spend a penny in the pound annually on its own authority, and if we understand Mr. Fowler's answer to Sir Charles Dilke, may spend a fresh penny every year ; but if it wants more than that, it must obtain permission to raise it, first, from the Parish Meeting, and secondly, from the District Council, which latter body, however, is not very likely, except in extreme cases, to override both the Council and the Meeting by a peremp- tory denial. The Parish, in fact, is made an entity, with property, with a revenue, and with powers of taxation ; and we have only to see what it will do with them all.
Not very much, probably. The powers granted are limited by the necessity of paying for the pleasure of using them ; and if we understand parochial life at all, the fear of raising rates will operate quite sufficiently, in every direction but one, to prevent any extravagance or undue rapidity in the direction of improvement. It does not lie in our mouths to declare the Parish electors idiots after giving them the franchise ; and unless they are idiots, they will manage the local affairs fairly well, quite as well as the overseers or churchwardens who have hitherto been entrusted with the duties. They are not to be, be it observed, the ultimate sanitary authorities any more than at present; and can neither engage, like some suburban parishes of London, in huge sanitary jobs, nor totally refuse to carry out sanitary improvements. They will probably be sensible enough, and a little mean ; our only serious fear being as to the allotments. In most parishes the Councillors will be judicious enough even about them, interfering only when the landlord refuses allotments altogether, or fixes his rates absurdly high, or chooses land which, owing to its distance from their cot- tages, adds too much to their daily stint of labour. There is no doubt that such landlords exist, especially in parishes where the farmers have it all their own way ; and the compulsory powers are therefore required. There are, however, districts, especially in Wales, where, owing to local circumstances, the grand village motor is personal spite, and where, therefore, land may be taken to the needless inconvenience, or even ruinous loss, of its owner. We think that, to guard against such cases, there should be some appeal either to the County Council or to a Court, and that the Bill should specifically except gardens and pleasure-lands clearly essential to the value of a house. With that exception, we do not see what harm the Parish Councils are to do ; while they may do some good in letting-off steam, and accustoming the people to the management of public business. It will be necessary, perhaps, to be sure that there is no privilege for libels uttered in Parish Meetings, in which enmities will occasionally run high ; but their proceedings will have a certain interest for the politician. It is a parochial Referendum which Mr. Fowler has put into his Bill, and we shall be very curious to see how that works,—whether the Comitia will be more audacious in expenditure than the Council, and urge it to further outlays ; or whether they will be, as we should rather expect, indignant when asked for anything beyond the legal annual penny. It is in its finance that the whole scheme will fail or succeed ; and finance is clearly to be dependent on the will of the whole parish in mass-meeting assembled. That is a very curious variation on urban management,—a reversion, as perhaps Mr. Fowler knows, to very ancient methods indeed.
Previous page
