Page:The government of London.djvu/11

 The aged and infirm poor were driven from the parish their labour had helped to enrich, to some other that knew them not, forthwith to be bundled out again. To the generation that has come to maturity under a different state of things, that which some of us are old enough to remember seems almost inconceivable.

In June, 1852, a Royal Commission, consisting of Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Justice Patteson, and Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, was appointed to inquire into the state of the Corporation of the City, and to collect information respecting its constitution and government, and regarding the property, revenues, and expenditure of the same.

By far the weightiest opinions given in evidence before the Commissioners were against a Metropolitan Council for the aggregate towns of the Thames, and "in favour of reforming the old Corporation of the City, and giving a new corporation to each of the surrounding boroughs." To expand the existing central jurisdiction so as to embrace the whole of the urban and suburban area would, in the judgment of Mr. Samuel Morley, be very undesirable. "It would be too large a body a great deal. Each corporation should be confined to the duties of its own locality." Mr. Thomson Hankey gave similar advice as to the need of distributing; the duties and localizing the functions of municipal rule; while both advocated the establishment by delegation of a board of works, carrying into effect improvements of exceptional nature and cost. The Commissioners, after duly considering all that could be urged upon the subject, reported unequivocally in confirmation of these views.

To advance the boundaries of the City so as to include the whole of the metropolis "would entirely alter the character of the Corporation of London, and would create a municipal body of unmanageable dimensions. We therefore advise that this course should not be adopted. If it were held that municipal institutions were not suited to a metropolitan city, no reason could be found except its antiquity and existence for maintaining the Corporation of London, even with its present limited area. A metropolitan city, however, requires for its own local purposes municipal institutions not less than other towns. Their utility is indeed greater, and their want more felt, in a large, populous, opulent, and crowded metro-