be conquered and annexed. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, the Science Museum, the Solar Physics Observatory, the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and the Museum of Practical Geology are subject to its sway. It has a Medical Department, an Architect's Department, a Legal Department, and a Welsh Department, with a Universities Branch for the training of teachers and for the supervision of Training Colleges. These complex functions involve a number of wellpaid posts and a vast machinery of subordinate offices, making ceaseless whirr and clatter, but chiefly occupied in grinding the wind. The examiners and inspectors exceed four hundred. Their power and influence are well known to school committees and to teachers. The mode of assertion may vary with individuals, and some are more gracious and considerate than others, but it is dangerous to entrust such authority to any class of officials. The inspectors might say that they do no more than carry out instructions; but the gravamen of the charge against the Education Department is that a castiron system has been devised, to which local circumstances must bend. A long series of Revised Codes and rules, and regulations and restrictions without number, prescribe what is to be done. From this Procrustean bed, prepared by academic doctrinaires, there is no escape. Education Committees appointed by County and Borough Councils, and local school managers, are held in rigid subjection, and are taught the way they must go and the pace they must observe. They are made to erect new school buildings, after patterns approved in Whitehall, irrespective of local needs and regardless of cost. If any of the orders are infringed, the Government grant can be withheld. Doles are made for special purposes and subjects and in aid of certain districts. The salaries of teachers, the size of classes, the shape of the seats and desks, the daily curriculum, the cubical contents of rooms, the lavatories and hat-pegs, and everything relating to the minutest routine work are matters for perpetual interference. The Local Government Board, the third of the crucial instances under review, exemplifies in an astounding degree the spirit of modern bureaucracy. For this reason it demands somewhat detailed examination. It is the outgrowth, by a Statute of 1871, of the old Poor Law Board, but with many duties superadded and with powers that are virtually absolute. It not only regulates poor relief and sanitary arrangements and the action of local authorities, but it exercises some seventy subsidiary functions. Its administrative expenses are 300,000l. per annum. It has a Parliamentary and a Permanent Secretary, and six assistant secretaries with salaries from 1000l. to 1500l. There are architects, legal advisers, a parliamentary agent, a medical staff, two bacteriologists, a controller of town-planning, and a geological adviser. In addition to a little army of clerks, there are 82 inspectors and 76 auditors, who cover reams of paper with reports which not one person in a thousand ever sees or hears of. These functionaries and their superiors have to deal with some 30,000 local authorities, including County and Borough Councils, Urban, Rural District, and Parish Councils, Boards of Guardians, Overseers, and Joint Committees for Small Pox and other infectious hospitals. These also have their clerks; and most of them have surveyors, engineers, medical officers of health, sanitary inspectors, rate collectors, and the usual official retinue. All these bodies are audited advised, controlled, circumscribed, and checked in endless ways from Whitehall. Accounts must be kept in prescribed forms, in a superfluity of books, involving constant repetitions of the same entries, but affording no effectual check. District auditors are appointed to exercise a supervision that is sometimes pedantic and absurd. They can disallow or surcharge any items; and their action is confirmed or reversed by the supreme permanent officials on appeal. Certificates having all the force of law are likewise issued, allotting the Exchequer contributions in aid of rates, adjusting payments among local authorities, determining boundaries for purposes of certain elections, and fixing the number of members. Boards of Guardians, elected by the ratepayers as their representatives, are subject to bewildering Consolidated General Orders, promulgated since 1842, sixtyseven in number, which have never been codified, and to incessant Administrative and Special Orders. Of the latter, about 1500 are issued annually. Guardians cannot take a step or lift a finger without permission. Their duties are defined with irritating minuteness. They are reprimanded if some official espies an infraction of a petty rule, or if he thinks they are too generous in granting out-relief. It is far more difficult to grant an extra sixpence a week to some poor old woman than it is to lavish hundreds of pounds on new structures or new machinery. The dietary scale in the workhouse is fixed and absolute, and must not be deviated from. The ingredients of a suet-pudding or of a basin of soup or gruel, and the quantities of bread, cheese, tea, etc., are rigidly prescribed. Other Boards of Guardians must have had experiences similar to that in one large Union a few months ago. The old and infirm men asked to have their allowance of four ounces of potatoes increased, because of the difficulty in masticating solid food. The doctor recommended eight ounces, which was approved by the House Committee and by the Board. Sanction was sought from Whitehall, and an inspector held a solemn enquiry. After an interval of several months, leave was granted to increase the quantity to six ounces. Appointments of officers are made subject to approval, which must also be obtained for any change in salaries or pensions. No dismissal can be made without leave; and officers are encouraged to regard themselves as subject to the Local Government Board, instead of to the Guardians who appoint and pay them. In these and other similar matters the central officials show generous consideration towards local subordinates. 'A fellowfeeling makes one wondrous kind.' There occurred recently a flagrant case of dismissal for gross insubordination, neglect of duty, and defiance of reasonable orders. Pressure was brought to bear, and the Guardians had to pay a large sum as compensation for loss of office. The offender had no difficulty in obtaining another post, through influence. When an officer, however humble, resigns, even though it be to marry or to go into trade, information is requested as to character and the manner in which duties were discharged. What object is thereby attained no one can say, but it furnishes employment to a number of clerks, and helps to swell the congested archives. This shadowy Board was designed to be a controlling F or restraining authority, instead of which it stimulates, and often enforces, expenditure. It is impossible to traverse the country without noticing the spacious and costly buildings that have been erected for pauper uses, and containing all the appliances of what is called sanitary science'-which is in perpetual flux-and the latest and most expensive machinery and fittings. No one desires that the poor, and especially the sick poor, should be neglected, but, in fact, they are treated in a manner to which they are unaccustomed, and which they do not appreciate. Speaking generally, it costs seventeen pence to disburse each shilling of indoor and outdoor relief. The officers' dietary is often on a lavish scale, and their salaries and emoluments are out of proportion to what they could earn in trade or in private employment. In addition, there are generous pensions looming in the distance, to which their own contributions are microscopic. Public attention needs to be called to the facts above recited, and especially to the extravagant outlay forced upon localities in the erection and maintenance of model workhouses and infirmaries, model schools and dwellings, model lunatic asylums and sewage works, and baths and washhouses. Permission is also freely granted for rearing stately town halls and municipal buildings, and for large expenditure on sewers, water supply, roads and kerbings, and on other works. Formal public enquiries by Whitehall inspectors, when local authorities are seeking powers to borrow money, furnish no adequate safeguards. The result is usually a foregone conclusion, and the permission sought is rarely refused. Many districts are burdened by enormous debts, contracted for these purposes, in opposition to public sentiment, and when no necessity existed. There are fatal facilities for borrowing, but the repayment of loans, with accrued interest, during the usual term of thirty years-the lifetime of one generation-is a serious demand upon ratepayers. Archdeacon Paley used to say that cash payments for purchases were a salutary check upon the feminine imagination. Forty years ago, local debts amounted to 92,000,000l. They are now 500,000,000l., or over two-thirds of the National Debt, which, according to the latest Return, is 711,288,4217. Corporation stocks no longer command a ready sale and high prices; and there is increasing difficulty in placing new loans, except on more onerous terms. Bankers and financiers view with concern the increase in local indebtedness. What Lord Bacon calls a solution of continuity' is never reached, because fresh obligations are perpetually incurred. No business and no household could be carried on under similar conditions without speedy insolvency. For a lengthened period the Whitehall authorities presented the customary official non possumus to the boarding-out of pauper children. Huge barrack schools had to be erected and maintained at enormous cost at Anerley, Hanwell, Sutton, Southall, Forest Gate, Brentwood, and many other places. Some of them were closed long after their failure had been demonstrated, and were sold for other purposes, but at a heavy loss. Not until after repeated outbreaks of ophthalmia and other diseases, and not until it could no longer be denied that a pauper taint was being perpetuated, and that the expense of maintenance was excessive and indefensible, was a change of method grudgingly conceded. Even now, boarding-out is permitted only in the case of orphan and deserted children, the number being not more than 11,397 out of a total of 70,676 in workhouses and other institutions, besides 178,815 receiving out-relief, according to the last return. With regard to others chargeable to the rates, the system of cottage homes or scattered homes has been introduced to a certain extent; but another plan, far more costly, is being adopted-that of creating village communities within a ring fence, thus isolating the children, as in the older district schools. Poplar Union, in the East End of London, noted for its crushing poverty and its heavy rates, has spent 162,000l. on one of these villages at Hutton, in Essex, for 470 children. The Greenwich Union has one at Sidcup, which cost 172,000l., or 290l. per bed. The Shirley Village Home of the Bermondsey Union involved an outlay for buildings of 189,000l., for 560 children, or 3201. per head; and the weekly cost at first was 20s. 1d. per head. The Local Government Board did nothing to check the reckless extravagance shown in these instances, and in others that might be cited. In the least expensive places of the kind 13s. 1d. per week is the cost for each |