Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/31

Rh The subjection of colonies to the home Government is still retained in two important cases. The colonies have no voice whatever in determining the nature of their relations with other communities ; the question of peace or war is decided for them by the home Government. Again, all the colonies, whatever may be their powers of local self- government, seek justice in the last resort from the sove reign in council.

2. Local Government.&mdash;As the business of society at large must be undertaken by the supreme government, so the local business of the subdivisions of society must be undertaken by local sub-governments. Local government repeats on a small scale the features of the supreme government, but its business is chiefly judicial and adminis trative. The most marked distinction here is between rural and urban communities between the county and the borough. Self-government or representative govern ment is the rule in the latter, the exception in the former. In England, since the Municipal Corporations Act, the affairs of all urban communities, except the city of London and a few unimportant boroughs, are managed by the direct representatives of the inhabitants. In the counties the control of affairs rests with the justices of the peace, who are nominated by the crown exclusively from the class of gentry. The degree of control exercised by the supreme govern ment over local governments is a point of first-rate import ance in the constitution of a country. Among free countries England and France stand at opposite ends of the scale, England being characterized by great local independence, France by strict central control. Thus it is said that, even under the republic, the minister of education can say that at a given hour all the children in all the schools of France are learning the same lesson. The habitual dependence of the French people upon the action of the state has been described as a survival from the times of imperial despotism which may be expected to disappear gradually under the influence of freedom. A step in this direction has certainly been taken in the proposal to allow communes to elect their own maire ; and the abuse of the prefectoral system by a recent ministry ought to lead to some diminution of its enormous powers. On the other hand the increased activity of the state, which, as we have already seen, has accompanied the establishment of popular government on a wide basis in England, has shown itself also in increased centralization. The new functions educational, sanitary, and other- imposed on local bodies are controlled by the supreme government through central boards. In 1871 the local government board was constituted to take over the powers of control over local boards hitherto exercised by various high officers of state, the poor law board, and the privy council. More recently the Prisons Act of 1877 has trans ferred to the secretary of state the powers hitherto exercised by the local prison authorities, and has made the cost of maintaining local prisons a burden on the public funds.

As we have already said, the work of local governments generally embraces very little that can properly be called legislation. They have a power of making bye-laws for carrying out within their district the purposes of a general law, and over that power the courts of justice exercise a vigilant control. Parliament in England has hitherto looked with great distrust on subordinate legislatures, and it is a common saying that the jealousy of the House of Commons is one of the reasons why the metropolis remains without municipal government. But it would now be generally admitted that the legislation demanded of parliament every year is greatly beyond its effective powers. There are in dications of an approach to something that may be described as home rule a name which inspires more distrust than the reality. Parliament makes no pretence of consistency in legislating separately for England, Scotland, and Ireland. To take only notorious examples, the Irish Land Act, flie Disestablishment Act, and the Sunday Liquor Act of Ireland, and the Forbes Mackenzie Act of Scotland are instances of legislation according to the supposed wishes of the people specially affected. Irish and Scotch business tends in the House of Commons more and more to fall into the hands of Irish and Scotch members, and the interference of others is not unfrequently resented as an intrusion. Again, private bill legislation, regulated as it is by ascertained general principles, has come to be in fact, as in form, a purely judicial proceeding, which might well be relegated, as it no doubt one day will be relegated, to local tribunals. Another indication of the same tendency is to be found in what is called permissive legislation, which leaves to local authorities the responsibility of deciding how far a given principle shal] be applied.

 GOWER, (1325 1-1408), one of the best of the English minor poets, was born in or about the year 1325 ; but the date is not exactly known. It has been conclu sively shown by Sir Harris Nicolas that he belonged to the county of Kent. His family was wealthy ; and he seems to have had various country houses. So far as we know he did not marry till 1397, when he was united to Agnes Groundolf. He was an intimate friend of Chaucer; but there is no evidence to prove that they were fellow- students. A few years after his marriage, Gower became blind, and had to give up writing. He spent his declining years in the priory of St Mary Overies, or, as it is now called, St Saviour s, in Southwark, where his monument is still to be seen. Near the close of the Confessio Amantis, Gower puts the following compliment to Chaucer into the mouth of Venus:- &quot; And greet weel Chaucer when ye meet, As my disciple and my poet ; For in the floures of his youth, In sundry wise, as he well couth Of ditties and of songes glade, The which he for my sake made, The land fulfilled is over all ;&quot; &c. In these lines he was merely requiting a compliment that had been paid him some years before by his brother-poet, who, in dedicating to him his Troihis and Cressida, addressed him as &quot; moral Gower,&quot; an epithet which, though not remarkably happy, has stuck to him. Gower died in 1408. In his will he leaves a number of religious legacies to various ecclesiastical persons and institutions, and 100, along with the rents of his manors, to his wife Agnes. The beautiful church in which Gower lies was rebuilt in great part at his expense, and proves, among other things, that he must have been exempt from one of the usual misfortunes of poets poverty. Gower s poetical works are four in number Balades and other Poems, in French, printed in 1818 for the Iloxburghe Club ; the Speculum Meditantis, a treatise on the duties of married life, written in French verse, and divided into ten books ; Vox Clamantis, a narrative in Latin elegiacs, of the insurrection of the commons in the reign of Richard II.; and the Confessio Amantis. The second of these works is believed to have perished ; of the third there is a good edition by the Rev. H. O. Coxe, printed for the Rox- burghe Club in 1850; and the fourth was first printed by Caxtou in 1483. The Confessio Amantis, or Lover s Confession, is a huge miscellaneous collection of physical, metaphysical, and moral reflexions, and of stories culled from the common repertories of the Middle Ages. A kind of unity is given to these apparently incongruous materials by the form of the poem, which is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is a priest of Venus, and is called Genius. In the moral part of his theme, Gower is confessedly wise, impressive, and sometimes almost 