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 buys the municipality's debts. If rates rise too high—and every rate-payer is inclined to regard his rates as too high—they tend to cause a lowering of rents and consequently of valuations for rates, and so the municipality has to impose a still higher rate on a lower valuation, and so increase the evil, or else reduce its expenditure which, like most public bodies that spend other people's money, it finds a very difficult task and highly unpopular with those on whom the expenditure is spent. If the evil becomes too acute, it may drive the inhabitants, residential, commercial and industrial, out of the area. Short of that it stops growth and makes anyone, who can do so, live or work anywhere else. Witness the tendency, already evident, of factories to be built outside urban areas in England; a tendency that may be a good deal quickened if and when any practical result comes from the schemes of electrical power distribution, about which much has lately been said.

Nevertheless, most of us believe that there never can be a question of the solvency of any of the great English towns, and have no hesitation in regarding their debts as almost as gilt-edged as those of the British Government. The fact remains, however, that the much narrower area of taxable capacity that they