Page:Local taxation and poor law administration in great cities.djvu/19

15 sinking. And I do not see how we can blame them as long as the temptations which at present exist are placed unneccessarily [sic] in their way.

Of course any improvement in the management of our Poor Law must involve an improvement in the Poor Law Board itself. As a Board it is a mere delusion. It never meets. The members in addition to the President, viz. the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, the Lord Privy Seal, and the President of the Council, are mere dummies as far as Poor Law administration is concerned. The President who is the only reality in the whole business, not only changes with every Government, but frequently during the same administration Improvement will be extremely difficult until you strengthen the permanent element in the Board. I have not the slightest doubt that the Right Honorable gentleman the member for Wolverhampton (Mr. Villiers), the Right Honorable gentleman the member for the University of Oxford (Mr. Gathorne Hardy), or the present head of the Poor Law Board, could either of them work out the reform that is necessary if they only remained long enough at the Board to be able to originate and carry it out. Formerly the Board could boast of such men as Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Sir G. Nichol, and Sir John Shaw Lefevre amongst its permanent, working, not political members, and there ought to be such permanent members now.

I am afraid that when I come to propose my remedy I may be met with an argument to which I should like to offer a few words in reply. We are all deeply grateful to the Right Honorable gentleman at the head of the Treasury and his colleagues for the vigilant, I might almost say the fierce, guardianship which they have displayed in defence of the public purse. But I venture to think they may be in danger of confining their attention too exclusively to the money raised by Imperial taxation, and overlook the fact that the money raised by local taxation deserves equal attention. For the local expenditure and the local taxation, especially in a free country like this, directly affect the large masses of the people upon whose soundness the national fabric rests; and if time allowed me I think I could prove from the history of other countries the danger of mismanaging local taxation and administration. But it is not necessary to refer to other countries. I would ask, what country was ever brought more nearly to the brink of ruin than this was under the old Poor Law, when