MUNICIPAL LONDON. T HE people, like property, has its duties as
well as its rights, and the duties are very much in evidence this autumn. Yesterday it had to be settled in the polling-booths what men and what tendencies should be dominant in the government of the Empire through a period which must be of critical importance to the British nation, and those who, without most cogent reasons, failed to exercise their franchise on that occasion were no good citizens. To-morrow, or rather on November 1st, the ratepayers in the Municipal Boroughs throughout the country will be called upon to decide what manner of men they shall be to whom shall be entrusted the control of local affairs in all, or almost all, but one of their most important aspects. (The exception is that of the schools, and will be dealt with by another set of elections a few days later.) For the first time in this anomaly-loving country, we who are citizens of any part of London, except the City, now enter upon full civic rights and duties in these matters. What kind of citizens shall we be if we fail to realise the greatness of the occasion ? In many very real senses it devolves upon us to make up, or at least to begin making up, for two long generations of neglect and delay. While since 1836 our fellow-countrymen in the greater and smaller provincial towns have been endowed with a machinery of self-government full enough, and as years passed increasingly equipped with the powers necessary for the realisation of advancing ideals and the satisfaction of developing needs, the municipal con- ditions in the Metropolis outside the City have been eminently unfavourable to progress. The substitution of the County Council for the Metropolitan Board of Works, which represented the Vestries and was vitiated in effectiveness and dignity by its origin, was an immense improvement. The Council, no doubt, has made mis- takes, but since its creation a fresh, and though inter- mittent, yet strong and wholesome, breeze of popular interest in local affairs has blown through the divers quarters of this dwelling-place of five million souls. But with the best will in the world the County Council could not bring London in line with the best-governed pro- vincial cities. Many of the powers essential for such an object remained with the unreformed Vestries and other obscure local bodies of Commissioners appointed for the carrying out of special Acts of Parliament. A piecemeal system it has been, without any kind of justification, logical, esthetic, or practical. But happily it has gone, and it is for us to build in its place a system worthy of the capital of the greatest of world-Empires, as the twentieth century dawns.
It is vital that the start should be a good one. It is easy enough, as municipal history in the provinces more than sufficiently shows, for fully fledged Borough authori- ties to come into disrepute ; and when that has once happened great efforts are needed to bring about a change and induce the well-to-do and cultured classes to discharge their duties towards their fellow-burgesses. But these new London Boroughs of ours are beginning their career with a virgin record, and rich in powers for the common good. None of the discredit attaching to the Vestry system pursues the new Councils, and all the lessons acquired in the working of that system are at the disposal of those— whether the same or other individuals—who will be chosen to administer the concentrated and extended powers with which the Borough Councils are endowed. Seldom, indeed, in the course of human affairs, individual or collective, does so favourable an opportunity occur of making a fresh start. In all cases the possibilities before the new municipalities are great. In some they are splendid, and conspicuously so in the great city-municipality of West- minster. It is hard to understand how any persons interested in municipal progress were averse as no doubt many of them were, to that creation of a Greater West- minster which was the most original and impressive feature of the London Government Act of 1899. Nothing is more important in the sphere of municipal work than that, where there is a need for great and continuous effort, the imagination should be caught and held. And here in West London, where the needs are so great, the condition we speak of is surely provided by the emergence of this powerful new authority, whose constituency stretches from Chancery Lane to Kensington Palace, from West- minster Bridge to Chelsea, from Oxford Street to the Thames, and stands at a rateable value of half a million sterling more than that of the City of London itself. Neither in Greater Westminster nor elsewhere are sudden transformation-scenes to be aimed at. But it is not too much to expect that within this single municipal area, which counts among its citizens almost all our legislators, and the heads of almost all the wealthiest and most cultivated families in the Kingdom, who resort hither for several months of every year for the enjoyment of social intercourse, under circumstances of the utmost luxury and refinement and with every possible esthetic adjunct, a local authority shall be constituted resolved to make West London a different and a better place to live in for all its inhabitants within ten years' time. There is no question more complex and difficult than that of the housing of the poor in urban districts, but if it can be dealt with anywhere on lines at once businesslike and philanthropic in such fashion as to secure the most widely diffused, real, and lasting amelioration of domestic conditions, it is in Greater Westminster that that blessed possibility may be realised. And that is only one side, if perhaps the most arduous and anxious, of the business which will present itself to the City Council of West- minster. In regard to general sanitation, to lighting—a function intimately connected with both morality and security—to the enforcement of the Factory and Work- shop Acts, in which the local authority plays a most important part, as well as in connection with the "adoptive" Acts, and the supervision of matters vitally concerned with public decency, the new Municipal Councils exercise powers to the importance of which the Christian Social Union has done well to direct attention. If in Westminster, under the leadership of a Mayor who should be a person of distinguished position and capacity, these powers are taken up gravely and resolutely, with a. rational appreciation at once of the value of high muni- cipal ideals, and of the due limits, moral and economic, to the intervention of authority, it is difficult to overrate the value of the direct and indirect results which may be looked for. The example so set could not fail to be full of guidance and inspiration.
But, after all, Westminster will only be the greatest, or rather the most conspicuously, and in many ways advantageously, placed, of the new Metropolitan munici- palities. There is not one of them in which the election of Councillors of the right stamp, who will place themselves under the presidency of a Mayor qualified to begin the creation of honourable traditions for his office, can fail to bring about an immediate improvement in the physical and moral conditions of life for multitudes. It is not, then, too much to ask that during the next few days every citizen who is conscious of the vast potential benefits of broad-minded, strenuous, and businesslike local government will bestir himself to find out which of the candidates before him are most deserving of his vote. There is apparently an abundance of choice. To a large extent party "tickets" are being run, but the polling-booths are secret and free, and there is nothing to prevent any citizen from making his own selection after such inquiry as is possible to him, from the lists offered by either side, and from the candidates who run under no political flag. Let him be, above all, careful to choose—and it will generally be possible—those men who combine liberality and loftiness of general aims with administrative or other business knowledge and ex- perience, and with dissociation from the likelihood of temptation to interested action. If over the London Boroughs generally, on November 1st, the ratepayers act on these principles, we may with good reason hope that before the new century is in its teens the capital of the Empire will be far less unworthy of that position than can be claimed for it in these closing months of 1900.
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