The Government of London. The unique governmental arrangements of London are the product partly of historical survival and partly of special and comparatively recent legislation. Technically, the "city" of London is still what it was centuries ago, i.e., an area with a government of its own comprising about one square mile on the left bank of the Thames. A series of measures covering a period of somewhat more than fifty years, however, has drawn the entire region occupied by the metropolis - geographically, parts of the three counties of Middlesex, Surrey, and Kent-into a carefully coördinated scheme of local administration. London was untouched by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, and the changes which brought into being the governmental system of the present day began to be introduced only with the adoption of the Metropolis Management Act of 1855. The government of the City was left unchanged, but the surrounding parishes, hitherto governed independently by their vestries, were at this time brought for certain purposes under the control of a central authority known as the Metropolitan Board of Works. The Local Government Act of 1888 went a step farther. The Board of Works was abolished, extra-city London was transformed into an administrative county of some 121 square miles, and upon the newly created London county council (elected by the ratepayers) was conferred a varied and highly important group of powers. Finally, in 1899 the London Government Act simplified the situation by sweeping away a mass of surviving authorities and jurisdictions and creating twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs, each with mayor, aldermen, and councilors such as any provincial borough possesses, although with powers specially defined and, on the side of finance, somewhat restricted. Within each borough are urban parishes, each with its own vestry.

The situation to-day, therefore, is briefly this. At the center of the metropolitan area stands the historic City, which is geographically in, but not politically of, the municipality. It is the heart of the English financial and business world, but it has a resident population of not above thirty thousand; and its government, composed of Lord Mayor, Court of Aldermen, and Court of Common Council, presents a singular combination of ancient and modern features. Outside of the City are twentyeight contiguous metropolitan boroughs, which in their organization are a cross between ordinary boroughs and urban districts. Coextensive with these geographically, and exercising a large amount of control over them, is the administrative county of

London, with its one hundred and eighteen councilors and its nineteen aldermen, presided over by an elective chairman. And sweeping far out into the surrounding areas are the jurisdictions of the Metropolitan Water Board and the Metropolitan Police Board; the authority of the latter extends over all parishes within fifteen miles of Charing Cross, an area of almost seven hundred square miles.1

1 For excellent descriptions of the government of London see Munro, Government of European Cities, 339-379 (bibliography, 395-402), and Lowell, Government of England, II, 202-232. Valuable works are G. L. Gomme, Governance of London: Studies on the Place Occupied by London in English Institutions (London, 1907); ibid., The London County Council: its Duties and Powers according to the Local Government Act of 1888 (London, 1888); A. MacMorran, The London Government Act (London, 1899); A. B. Hopkins, Boroughs of the Metropolis (London, 1900); and J. R. Seager, Government of London under the London Government Act (London, 1904). An informing article is G. L. Fox, “The London County Council," in Yale Rev., May, 1895.

The best work on the general subject of English local government is J. Redlich, and F. W. Hirst, Local Government in England, 2 vols. (London, 1903). There are several convenient manuals, among them P. Ashley, English Local Government (London, 1905); W. B. Odgers, Local Government (London, 1899), based on the older work of M. D. Chalmers; E. Jenks, Outline of English Local Government (2d ed., London, 1907); R. S. Wright and H. Hobhouse, Outline of Local Government and Local Taxation in England and Wales (3d ed., London, 1906); and R. C. Maxwell, English Local Government (London, 1900). The subject is treated admirably in Lowell, Government of England, II, Chaps. xxxviii-xlvi, and a portion of it in W. B. Munro, Government of European Cities (New York, 1909), Chap. iii (full bibliography, pp. 395-402). There are good sketches in Ashley, Local and Central Government, Chaps. i and v, and Marriott, English Political Institutions, Chap. xiii. The task of reform is described in H. J. Laski, The Problem of Administrative Areas (Northampton, 1918). A valuable group of papers read at the First International Congress of the Administrative Sciences, held at Brussels in July, 1910, is printed in G. M. Harris, Problems of Local Government (London, 1911). A useful compendium of laws relating to city government is C. Rawlinson, Municipal Corporation Acts and Other Enactments (9th ed., London, 1903). Two appreciative surveys by American writers are A. Shaw, Municipal Government in Great Britain (New York, 1898), and F. Howe, The British City (New York, 1907). On the subject of municipal trading the reader may be referred to Lowell, Government of England, II, Chap. xliv, and Lord Avebury, Municipal and National Trading (London, 1907). Among works on poor-law administration may be mentioned T. A. Mackay, History of the English Poor Law from 1834 to the Present Time (New York, 1900); P. T. Aschrott and H. P. Thomas, The English Poor Law System, Past and Present (2d ed., London, 1902); and S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law Policy (London, 1910). The best treatise on educational administration is G. Balfour, Educational Systems of Great Britain and Ireland (2d ed., London, 1904). Finally must be mentioned C. Gross, Bibliography of British Municipal History (New York, 1897), an invaluable guide to the voluminous literature of an intricate subject.

CHAPTER XIV

POLITICAL PARTIES SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Importance and Uses of Party. It may be set down as an axiom that political parties are not only an inevitable but a necessary and proper adjunct of any scheme of popular government. The moment the people set about deciding upon public policy, or electing representatives to formulate and execute such policy, differences of view appear; and out of these differences of view political parties arise. There is, of course, hardly anything that has been more abused than party organization and spirit. Party principles, party programs, party committees and managers, party treasuries, party propaganda - all have been brought into frequent disrepute; so that, as one writer has wittily remarked, while men may be willing to die for party, they seldom praise it. None the less, political parties afford perhaps a clearer index than anything else of the political capacity and advancement of a nation. The most gifted and freest nations politically are those that have the most sharply defined parties. . . . Wherever political parties are non-existent, one finds either a passive indifference to all public concerns, born of ignorance and incapacity, or else one finds the presence of a tyrannical and despotic form of government, suppressing the common manifestations of opinion and aspiration on the part of the people. Organized, drilled, and disciplined parties are the only means we have yet discovered by which to secure responsible government, and thus to execute the will of the people." 2

The uses of political parties in a democracy are fivefold. First, they enable men who think alike on public questions to unite in support of a common body of principles and policies and to work together to bring these principles and policies into actual operation. Second, they afford a useful, if not indispensable,

1 Low, Governance of England (new ed.), 119.

2 P. O. Ray, Introduction to Political Parties and Practical Politics (new ed., New York, 1917), 9-10. See the comment on this subject in A. Esmein, Eléments de droit constitutionnel français et comparé (4th ed., Paris, 1906), 168–178.

means by which men who have the same objects in view may agree in advance upon the candidates whom they will support for office, and recommend them to the general electorate. Third, parties educate and organize public opinion and stimulate public interest, by keeping the public informed upon the issues of the day through the press, platform, and other agencies. Fourth, they furnish a certain social and political cement by which the more or less independent and scattered parts of the government (in so far as they are in the hands of men belonging to a single party) are bound together in an effective working mechanism. Fifth, the party system insures that the government at any given time will be subject to steady and organized criticism, whose effect will usually be wholesome.1

Government by Party in England. In these and other ways parties contribute greatly to the carrying on of government in all democratic states. Nowhere, however, does " government by party" prevail in the same degree as in England. To understand why this is so it is necessary merely to bring together certain facts, some of which are already familiar. The most important single feature of the English government as it now operates is the cabinet system; and the essentials of this system include (1) the appointment of the ministers from the party which at the given time controls the House of Commons, and (2) the retirement of these ministers whenever they can no longer command the support of a parliamentary majority. This system arose out of the warfare of parties; it is inconceivable that it should ever have arisen without parties and party conflict. The connection is not, however, a matter merely of historical origins; parties are indispensable to the successful operation, and even to the continuance, of the system. The only kind of majority that has sufficient coherence and stability to make it dependable is a majority held together by the ties of party. In the absence of parties the situation would be either that ministries would rise and fall with lightning rapidity because no organized force would be interested in keeping them in power, or that they would go on ruling indefinitely after they had got entirely out of harmony with the popular chamber. There would be no point to the retirement of a ministry, did not

1 Compare, however, the trenchant criticisms of parties and the party system contained in H. Belloc and G. Chesterton, The Party System (London, 1911), and R. Michels, Les partis politiques; essai sur les tendances oligarchiques des démocraties (Paris, 1914), trans. under the title Political Parties: a Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York, 1915).

an opposing party stand ready to set up a ministry of a different sort and assume full power and responsibility.

The cabinet system and the party system are, therefore, intimately bound up together; indeed, they are but different aspects of the same working arrangement. In the United States parties stand outside the formal governmental system; until within recent decades their activities were not even subject to regulation by law. Many of the great party leaders and managers for example, the chairmen of the national committees are not public officials at all, and platforms are made by conventions whose members are drawn mainly from private life. In England, however, party works inside rather than outside the governmental system; speaking broadly, the machinery of party and the machinery of government are one and the same thing. The ministers at all events those who sit in the cabinet are at the same time the working executive, the leaders in legislation, and the chiefs of the party in power. The majority in the House of Commons, which legislates, appropriates money, supervises and controls administration, and upholds the ministers as long as it is able, is for all practical purposes the party itself; while over against the ministry and its parliamentary majority stands the Opposition, consisting of influential exponents of the contrary political faith, who, in turn, lead the rank and file of their party organization, and are ready to take the helm whenever their rivals fall out of favor in the popular chamber.

Two-Party Organization. Not only is it true that a responsible ministry involves government by party; in order to work smoothly such a ministerial system requires the existence of two great parties and no more each, in the words of Bryce,

strong enough to restrain the violence of the other, yet one of them steadily preponderant in any given House of Commons." Considerations of unity and responsibility demand that the party in power shall be strong enough to govern alone, or substantially so. Similarly, when it goes out of power, a party of at least equal strength ought to come in. Obviously, this must mean two great parties, practically dividing the electorate between them. Any considerable splitting up of the people beyond this point is likely to result in the inability of any single party to command a working majority, with the result that ministries will have to represent coalitions, which will lack unity and responsibility, and will be liable to be toppled over by the

1 American Commonwealth, I, 287.