Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/215

 and more important was the public health amendment bill for the metropolis, which was read for a third time on 27 Jmie 1891, and, in its final form, represented the results of the best sanitary knowledge of the day. Ritchie's poor law administration showed the sympathetic spirit with which he always approached the study of the welfare of the poorest classes.

Ritchie's six years at the local government board fully established his reputation as an administrator who brought to political work the sound common-sense trained in years of business life. At the general election of 1892 he was defeated in the contest at St. Greorge's-in-the-East. A liberal government returned to power, and Ritchie was out of parliament until 1895. At a bye-election on 24 May of that year he was chosen for Croydon without a contest. The liberal government resigned in the following June, and in Lord Salisbury's third administration Ritchie again accepted a seat in the cabinet, being made president of the board of trade. In that capacity Ritchie was responsible for much useful legislation, touching the railway, marine, commercial, labour, and statistical departments of the board.

His first important measure was the Concihation Act of 1896, which established conciliation boards for the settlement of labour disputes. The board of trade was authorised to formulate regulations of procedure and thus first exercised the power of negotiating in trade disputes. Between the passing of the Act in 1896 and the end of Ritchie's presidency in 1900, the number of cases so dealt with was 113, seventy of which were settled under the Act {Official Memorandum of the Board of Trade). In Feb. 1898 his personal intervention put an end to an eight months' strike in the engineering trade. Another useful measure of the same year (1896) was the Light Railways Act, which embodied experience gained by Ritchie on visits to France and Belgium. The Act provides that light railways may be proposed by any local authority and, if their proposals are approved by the commissioners appointed to consider them, they may take the necessary land, after paying a fair valuation, by compulsion, and may proceed with the work without obtaining parliamentary sanction. In 1897 Ritchie appointed a very important departmental committee on commercial intelligence, which was required to consider the best means whereby British manufacturers might obtain information as to the most favourable markets for their goods in the colonies and in India. As a result of the committee's report, there was established in October 1899 a new intelligence branch of the commercial, labour, and statistical departments of the board of trade {Board of Trade Memorandum). A Merchant Shipping (Mercantile Marine Fund) Act which was passed by Ritchie in 1898 was based upon the recommendations of a committee appointed by Mr. James Bryce in 1894 and presided over by Mr. Leonard (now Lord Courtney). Its most important provision was an allowance to shipowners for carrying boys who enrol themselves in the royal naval reserve. The intention was to check the serious decline in the numbers of British-born merchant seamen, who were estimated to have decreased at the rate of more than a thousand annually during the past five years and were in regard to foreign sailors in the proportion of one to three. Under Ritchie's Act the British boy sailors in the reserve numbered 302 in 1899-1900, the first year of its operation, and 2230 on 31 March 1903.

The growth of fatal or serious accidents amongst railway servants (1896-8) led Ritchie to procure the appointment of a royal commission of inquiry, with the result that he passed in 1900 the Railway Employment (Prevention of Accidents) Act, which dealt fully with the means of increased protection. Ritchie's Companies Act of 26 June 1900, which was practically a bill passed by a select committee of the House of Commons appointed in 1894 {Parliamentary Debates, vol. 84, 4th series), endeavoured to strengthen the existing law against fraudulent and inflated companies.

At the general election of September 1900 Ritchie was returned for Croydon unopposed. The conservatives retained their majority, but in November 1900 Lord Salisbury made some changes in the ministry, and Ritchie was transferred from the board of trade to the home office in succession to Sir Matthew White Ridley [q. v. Suppl. II]. His administration of the board of trade, which had shown diligence, conciliatory spirit, and powers of clarifying confusion, had greatly improved the repute of the department.

As home secretary, one of Ritchie's earliest duties was to carry out the ancient ceremonies incident to the death, after a reign of sixty- three years, of Queen Victoria, with whom his personal relations were always cordial. Soon afterwards Ritchie undertook an elaborate and complicated