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 is well known, to carry the democratic principle to its extreme limits in local elections. Qualifications both for candidates and voters were swept away—as also was the principle of nomination by the Local Government Board. The last trace of plural voting was effaced, and the principle that taxation and representation go together finally discarded. It was urged that the measure would widen and intensify the interest in local affairs, that with greater power there would come greater responsibility, and that thenceforward every citizen would be awakened to an intelligent interest in local government and to a full sense of its importance. The average citizen who had up to that time displayed a persistent disregard for the affairs of his town or parish was to be "educated" out of his apathy by a sense of responsibility. It was suggested at the time that the administration of the Poor Law was too difficult and complex a subject for the turmoil of the hustings. The answer was that the electorate would soon learn all that it was necessary to learn about the Poor Law, and would exercise their suffrages with discretion and intelligence. More than ten years have gone by. The Act has had a fair trial, and it is time to inquire how it has worked, and whether in fact it has had, or appears in the fair way to obtain, the results that were anticipated by its authors.

An attempt is made in this article to bring these questions to some sort of preliminary test by an inquiry with regard to a single local election in a single place—the election, namely, of Boards of Guardians in London, which took place in 1904. A fuller inquiry is no doubt very desirable, but a single election in a great town may be fairly taken as a test of the conditions attending similar elections in other great centres of population. Moreover, a Poor Law election has a special significance because