Page:The government of London.djvu/14

 guest of the Sheriffs and Lord Mayor. Neither was anything done to create new corporations where confessedly they were so much wanted, but six and thirty parishes and unions were deemed worthy instead to elect triennial vestries on a uniform plan, to whom were to be committed the care of paving and lighting, removing nuisances, and, when they chose, watering the streets. No magisterial authority was to be conferred upon them, nor even a superintending control over gas and water supply. The most important privilege with which they were to be endowed was that of choosing members of a Metropolitan Board who should regulate in future the main drainage and the making of great thoroughfares in the metropolis. But the evils of neglect had been suffered to exist so long, and the inorganic helplessness of dissociated communities was so paralytic, that neither Government nor Opposition would attempt the difficult, and in a party sense the thankless, task of trying to inform them with the higher spirit of municipal life.

Had the framing of a measure for municipalizing London been confided in 1855 to a statesman imbued with constitutional learning and feeling, the materials lay ready to his hand; and impediments there were really none. The Report of the Commission had cleared the site and given the ground plan for a great and suitable design in harmony with the best traditions of the realm, and capable alike of local expansion and of federal adaptation. The patient and pondering mind of Sir G. C. Lewis, full of the wisdom that comes of youth spent in study, and of manhood disciplined by experience in administrative life, would have set about methodically building up municipalities on either side of the Thames, fitted to satisfy all that was best in middle-class ambition, and to save so many great and growing communities from liability to the alternate reproach of unpatriotic apathy and fitful yielding to the passion or delusion of the hour. His was emphatically a mind given to organization; but by temper and conviction he was averse from the introduction of more of novelty than could be helped, having regard to the progress of society and the growth of the time. He thought the duty of a loyal and liberal legislator was to follow a good precedent wherever he could find it, and to restore what had been lost by decay or lapse; content to improve rather than eager to invent, to A 2