One official whose immense importance to the community, greater today
than ever, is much too little appreciated, is the town-clerk. Parliament passes Acts, but municipalities administer them, and the head of each municipal administration system is the town-clerk. I have just been asking one of the highest authorities on social conditions in London how the borough councils are standing up to their new and vast responsibilities in this emergency. "It all depends," he said, not very surprisingly, "on the town-clerk. If he is a first-class man everything goes well. If he is not there is sure to be difficulty and trouble." I remember what a foreign student of English institutions once said : "No one seems to realise that England is in effect governed by about eighty town-clerks." There is a good deal of truth in the dictum—which does not apply to Scotland, where the municipal government system is different.
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