Contents
Chapter
Preface
I. What the Grants in Aid seem to be and what they really are.
II. Why have Grants in Aid at all?
III. How we distribute Thirty Millions a Year in Grants in aid.
IV. The Grants in Aid of the Poor Law Authorities.
V. The Grants in Aid of the Local Education Authorities.
V1. The Lines of Reform.
In this volume, the authors of Industrial Democracy and English Local Government present what is practically a history of the English Poor Law, so far as the policy of the central authority is concerned, from the Report of the Royal Commission of 1832-4 down to that of the Royal Commission of 1905-9. For this work they have analysed, not only the statutes, but also the bewildering array of General and Special Orders, Circulars, Minutes, Inspectors’ exhortations, and unpublished letters, by means of which the Poor Law Commissioners, the Poor Law Board, and the Local Government Board have sought to direct the policy of the Boards of Guardians. No such history has before been attempted. For the first time the gradual development of policy can be traced, with regard to children, to the sick, to the aged and infirm, to vagrants, to the able-bodied, etc. The reader is enabled to watch the gradual and almost unconscious evolution, from out of the “principles of 1834,” of what may be called the “principles of 1907”; being the lines of policy to which the experience of three-quarters of a century had brought the administrator, when the recent Royal Commission overhauled the subject. Two concluding chapters summarise and analyse the proposals of the Majority and Minority Reports.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
English Local Government
(THE PARISH AND THE COUNTY)
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS ACT
This work, the result of eight years’ research into the manuscript records of the Parish and the County all over England and Wales—from Northumberland to Cornwall, from Cardigan to Kent—combines history and description in a continuous narrative of extraordinary interest. Avoiding the questions of the origin of English local institutions, and even of their mediæval development, the authors plunge at once into a vivid description of the Parish Officers and the Vestry, Quarter Sessions and the Justices of the Peace, the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff, together with all the other authorities by which the internal administration was actually carried on. An entirely new view is presented of the social and political development of Parish Vestry and Quarter Sessions, of their relations to the Squire and the Incumbent, and of their attitude towards Parliament and the problems of their age. But the book is more than a contribution to history and political science. Practically all the counties of England and Wales, and literally hundreds of parishes, find place in this unique record of life and manners, in which are embedded not a few dramatic episodes of absorbing interest. It is a new picture of English life between 1689 and 1835 as it actually was in country and town, with graphic tracings of its results on national progress and on the social and economic problems by which we are now confronted.
The Parish
Introduction.
The Legal Framework of the Parish.
(a) The Area and Membership of the Parish; (b) The Officers of the Parish; (c) The Servants of the Parish; (d) The Incumbent; (e) The Parish Vestry; (f) The Parish as a Unit of Obligation.
Unorganised Parish Government.
(a) The Parish Oligarchy; (b) Government by Consent; (c) The Uncontrolled Parish Officers; (d) The Rule of the Boss; (e) The Turbulent Open Vestry.
An Extra-legal Democracy.
(a) The Organisation of the Public Meeting; (b) The Control over the Unpaid Officers; (c) A Salaried Staff; (d) The Parish Committee; (e) An Organised Democracy; (f) The Recalcitrant Minority.
The Strangling of the Parish.
(a) Eighteenth-Century Legislation; (b) The Sturges Bourne Acts; (c) The Sturges Bourne Select Vestries; (d) The Salaried Overseer; (e) The Referendum; (f) The Death of the Parish.
The Legality of the Close Vestry.
(a) The Close Vestry by Immemorial Custom; (b) The Close Vestry by Bishop’s Faculty; (c) The Close Vestry by Church Building Act; (d) The Close Vestry by Local Act; (e) The Constitutions of Close Vestries.
Close Vestry Administration.
(a) Provincial Close Vestries; (b) Metropolitan Close Vestries; (c) Close Vestry Exclusiveness; (d) The Worst And The Best.
The Reform of the Close Vestry.
(a) The Assaults That Failed; (b) A London Movement; (c) Opening the Close Vestry.
The County
Introduction.
The Legal Constitution of the County.
(a) The Area and Divisions of the County; (b) The Custos Rotulorum; (c) The Sheriff and his Court; (d) The High Constable; (e) The Coroner; (f) The Commission of the Peace; (g) County Service; (h) An Organ of National Government.
On some Anomalous County Jurisdictions, including the Counties Palatine.
The Rulers of the County.
(a) Number and Distribution of Justices; (b) The Justice of Mean Degree; (c) The Trading Justice; (d) The Court Justice; (e) The Sycophant Justice and Rural Tyrant; (f) The Mouth-piece of the Clerk; (g) The Clerical Justice; (h) The Leader of the Parish; (i) Leaders of the County; (j) The Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff; (k) Class Exclusiveness.
County Administration by Justices out of Sessions.
(a) The “Single Justice”; (b) The “Double Justice”; (c) The Special Sessions; (d) Petty Sessions; (e) The Servants of the Justices; (f) The Sphere of Justices “Out of Sessions.”
The Court of Quarter Sessions.
(a) The Time and Place of Meeting; (b) The Chairman of the Court; (c) The Procedure of the Court; (d) Administration by Judicial Process; (e) The Grand Jury; (f) The Hundred Jury; (g) Presentments by Constables; (h) Presentments by Justices.
The Development of an Extra-legal Constitution.
I. The County Executive.
(a) The High Sheriff and his Bailiffs; (b) The High Constable; (c) The Clerk of the Peace; (d) The County Treasurer; (e) The County Surveyor; (f) Executive Makeshifts; (g) Committees of Justices.
II. An Inchoate Provincial Legislature.
III. An Extra-legal County Oligarchy.
The Reaction Against the Rulers of the County.
(a) The Breakdown of the Middlesex Bench; (b) The Lack of Justices; (c) The Restriction of Public Houses; (d) The Justices’ Poor Law; (e) The Growth of County Expenditure; (f) The Severity of the Game Laws; (g) The Stopping up of Footpaths; (h) The Stripping of the Oligarchy; (i) Why the Justices Survived.
LONGMANS. GREEN & CO.
English Local Government
(THE MANOR AND THE BOROUGH)
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS ACT
In this second instalment of their English Local Government the authors apply their method of combined history and analysis to the fascinating story of the towns and the manorial communities, of which several hundreds find mention, belonging to all the counties of England and Wales. An interesting new account is given, from unpublished materials, of the organisation and development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Manor and its several Courts, with picturesque glimpses of the hitherto undescribed part played by the Jury in the common-field agriculture. But the Manor is shown to be also the starting-point for a whole series of constitutional developments, passing through grade after grade of Manorial Borough, hitherto undescribed, into the complete Municipal Corporation. This, too, is analysed and described in a way never before attempted, so as to make the strangely interesting life of the towns live before us. A special chapter is devoted to the Boroughs of Wales, in which their national peculiarities are brought out. Their extensive study of the manuscript records enable the authors to set forth the inner working of the “Municipal Democracies” that existed alongside the chartered oligarchies, with their many analogies to modern American cities; and to bring vividly to notice the conditions and limitations of successive Democratic government. There is an interesting sketch of English hierarchies of town government, chief among them being the Cinque Ports, the constitutional position of which is presented in a new light. The anomalous history of the City of Westminster is explored by the light of the unpublished archives of its peculiar municipal organisation. An altogether novel view is presented of the constitutional development of the greatest municipality of all, the Corporation of the City of London, to which no fewer than 124 pages are devoted. The work concludes with a picturesque account of the “Municipal Revolution” of 1835, and the Homeric combat of Brougham and Lyndhurst which ended in the Municipal Reform Act of 1835.
Introduction
The Lord’s Court—
(a) The Lawyer’s View of the Lord’s Court. (b) The Court Baron. (c) The Court Leet.
The Court in Ruins—
(a) The Hierarchy of Courts. (b) The Court of the Hundred. (c) The Court of the Manor: (i.) The Bamburgh Courts. (ii.) The Court Leet of the Savoy. (iii.) The Court Leet and Court Baron of Manchester. (d) The Prevalence and Decay of the Lord’s Court.
The Manorial Borough—
(a) The Village Meeting. (b) The Chartered Township. (c) The Lordless Court. (d) The Lord’s Borough. (e) The Enfranchised Manorial Borough. (f) Manor and Gild. (g) Arrested Development and Decay.
The City and Borough of Westminster—
(a) Burleigh’s Constitution. (b) Municipal Atrophy.
The Boroughs of Wales—
(a) Incipient Autonomy. (b) The Welsh Manorial Borough. (c) The Welsh Municipal Corporation.
The Municipal Corporation—
(a) The Instrument of Incorporation. (b) Corporate Jurisdictions. (c) Corporate Obligations. (d) The Area of the Corporation. (e) The Membership of the Corporation. (f) The Servants of the Corporation. (g) The Chief Officers of the Corporation. (h) The Head of the Corporation. (i) The Bailiffs. (j) The High Steward and the Recorder. (k) The Chamberlain and the Town Clerk. (l) The County Officers of the Municipal Corporation. (m) The Mayor’s Brethren and the Mayor’s Counsellors. (n) The Courts of the Corporation. (o) Courts of Civil Jurisdiction. (p) The Court Leet. (q) The Borough Court of Quarter Sessions. (r) Courts of Specialised Jurisdiction. (s) The Administrative Courts of the Municipal Corporation. (t) The Municipal Constitutions of 1689.
Municipal Disintegration—
(a) The Rise of the Corporate Magistracy. (b) The Decline of the Common Council. (c) The Establishment of New Statutory Authorities. (d) The Passing of the Freemen. (e) The Mingling of Growth and Decay.
Administration by Close Corporations—
(Penzance, Leeds, Coventry, Bristol, Leicester, and Liverpool.)
Administration by Municipal Democracies—
(Morpeth, Berwick-upon-tweed, Norwich, and Ipswich.)
The City of London—
(a) The Legal Constitution of the City. (b) The Service of the Citizen to his Ward. (c) The Precinct. (d) The Inquest of the Ward. (e) The Common Council of the Ward. (f) The Decay of Ward Government. (g) The Court of Common Hall. (h) The Court of Common Council. (i) The Court of Aldermen. (j) The Shrievalty. (k) The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor. (l) The Officers of the Corporation. (m) A Ratepayers’ Democracy.
The Municipal Revolution—
(a) Towards the Revolution. (b) Instalments of Reform. (c) The Royal Commission. (d) An Alternative Judgment. (e) The Whig Bill. (f) The Municipal Corporations Act.
Index of Subjects.
Index of Authors and Other Persons.
Index of Places.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
English Local Government
SOME PRESS NOTICES OF
“A book of the deepest, even of fascinating interest. Here for the first time we have a real study of local life in England, in village and town and country.... Everywhere we follow the gallant fights of humane and just men whose stories are scattered through these pages, along with the sharp dealings of the astute. Familiar names meet us—a great-uncle of Cecil Rhodes making his ‘Empire’ in St. Pancras; the novelist Fielding cutting down the gains of the magistrate who preyed on the poor.... Noble figures stand out among the ignoble. As in the parish, the rulers of the county... found themselves left free... to administer as they thought fit. They used the power fully; governed, legislated, silently transformed their constitution, and showed themselves capable of the same extremes as the men of the parish, except that they never surrendered to the ‘boss.’... We have only touched here on the tale the authors give, so absorbing in interest to any Englishman.... The best tribute to the writers of this most valuable work is the difficulty of turning away for comment or criticism from the subjects they present in such a vigorous and human form.... They have opened a new chapter in English history.”—Mrs. J. R. Green, in Westminster Gazette.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb’s monumental work on our local institutions must be a source at once of pride and of something a little like shame. Here at last we have a book which is more than worthy to be placed beside those of the great continental writers on the subject.... Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb are as learned as the Prussian, as lucid as the Frenchman, and as scholarly and careful as the Austrian.... If it is literature to present a singularly vivid picture of a past stage of society, to render it real and lifelike by a careful selection and skilful grouping of illustrative details, and to explain its meaning with clearness, sound judgment, and not infrequent touches of quiet humour, then assuredly is this volume literary as well as learned.... Packed as it is with quotations and references, it is full of transcripts from life which one reader at least has found more fascinating than many of the efforts made to revivify the past through the medium of historical romance or romantic history. The story of the rise, the decline, and the fall of the parish autonomy and the old county oligarchy is in itself a sort of epic not wanting in the elements of adventure, and even of tragedy.... Here and there a remarkable personality emerges.”—Mr. Sidney Low, in Standard.
“Without exaggeration it may be said that this work will necessitate the rewriting of English history.... We are ushered into a new world, full of eager and heated interest.... The authors have contrived to make these dead bones live. Everywhere are peepholes into the lives of the people, and occasionally a connected story... throws a flood of light on English society. There is not a chapter which is not full of facts of general interest, while the whole volume... will be altogether indispensable to the serious student.... There is a fascinating tale of the ‘boss’ of Bethnal Green.... A history of the English people, richer in local colour, more comprehensive in its survey of social affairs, and more truly human in its sympathies than any treatise hitherto given to the public.”—Mr. R. A. Bray, in Daily News.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb continue their laborious and luminous studies of English local institutions. In the last two volumes we find the same characteristics as those already published respecting the parish and the county—a minute investigation conducted not in the spirit of the antiquary, but with an eye to realities which are of interest to the politician, the historian, and the economist; an examination of the vast mass of printed matter on the subject, much of it practically inaccessible; and exhaustive enquiry among unedited manuscript records, some of them probably never before read. A few lines in the text or in a footnote are the results of prolonged local investigation; a few unobtrusive words at the close of a sentence, or qualifying some general statement, are the fruits of a careful search among the muniments of some corporation. We cannot speak too highly of the industry and patience which these volumes attest. They possess even rarer merits. The whole subject is set in a new light. We get away from traditional formulæ and conceptions. We see the local institutions at work, and they appear very different from what they are represented by lawyers to be.”—Times.
“If it be true, as many deep thinkers maintain, that history affords the only sure key to a thorough knowledge of political institutions, then the work of which these two learned and elaborate volumes form a part is indispensable to every serious student of English Local Government, for the history of that subject has never yet been expounded with such completeness and so scientific an impartiality.... A pioneer in a new way of writing the history of institutions.... By the skill with which they present the general movement of institutional developments as the outgrowth of natural forces, and constantly illustrate it by particular points of actuality and human interest, these writers have given new life to a study too long neglected.”—Scotsman.
“Closely packed tomes, crowded with detail, and exhibiting the result of a sum of research and investigation which leaves the indolent, irresponsible reviewer almost wordless with respectful admiration.... Such a collection of original material has been weighed and sifted as might move the envy of any German professor.”—Evening Standard.
“For years to come they will still be sifting, amassing, arranging, but their reputation as the foremost investigators of fact now amongst us is likely to be confirmed rather than shaken. Their work is as minute in detail as it is imposing in mass. In their patience they possess their intellect, and they remind us of the scholar with a magnifying glass in a picture by Jan van Eyck.”—Observer.
The Break-Up of the Poor Law
BEING PART I. OF THE MINORITY REPORT OF THE
POOR LAW COMMISSION
Edited, with Introduction, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
“English Local Government”
Bluebooks, it has been said, are places of burial. The original edition of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Agencies dealing with the Unemployed is a ponderous tome of seven pounds weight, crowded with references, footnotes, and appendices, impossible either to handle or to read. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have, therefore, rescued from this tomb the Minority Report signed by the Dean of Norwich, Messrs. Chandler and Lansbury, and Mrs. Webb herself. By omitting all the notes and references, and printing the text in clear type on a convenient octavo page, they present the reader with something which he can hold with comfort by his fireside.
This Minority Report is a new departure in such documents. More than 20,000 copies have already been disposed of, and it is still selling like the last new novel. It is readable and even exciting. It is complete in itself. It presents, in ordered sequence, page by page, a masterly survey of what is actually going on in our workhouses and in the homes of those maintained on Outdoor Relief. It describes in precise detail from carefully authenticated evidence what is happening to the infants, to the children of school age, to the sick, to the mentally defective, to the widows with children struggling on their pittances of Outdoor Relief, to the aged and infirm inside the workhouse and outside. It sets forth the overlapping of the Poor Law with the newer work of the Education and Public Health Authorities, and the consequent waste and confusion. It gives a graphic vision of the working of the whole Poor Law machinery in all parts of the United Kingdom, which is costing us nearly twenty millions sterling per annum.
The volume concludes with a Scheme of Reform, of novel and far-reaching character, which is elaborately worked out in detail, involving the abolition of the workhouse, the complete disappearance of the Poor Law, and the transfer of the care of the children, the sick, the mentally defective, and the aged to the several committees of the Town and County Councils already administering analogous services, in order that we may now, in the twentieth century, set ourselves to prevent destitution, instead of waiting until it occurs.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
The Public Organization of the Labour Market
BEING PART II. OF THE MINORITY REPORT OF THE
POOR LAW COMMISSION
Edited, with Introduction, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
“English Local Government”
The Problem of the Unemployed, which the Royal Commission on the Poor Law was incidentally set to solve, is the question of the day. Part II. of the Minority Report deals with it in a manner at once comprehensive and complete. The whole of the experience of the Poor Law Authorities, and their bankruptcy as regards the destitute able-bodied, is surveyed in vivid and picturesque detail. There is a brief account of the work of Voluntary Agencies. A lucid description is then given, with much new information, of the movement started by Mr. Chamberlain in 1886, which culminated in the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. The story is told of the various experiments and devices that have been tried during the past twenty years, the Relief Works and the Farm Colonies, etc. This leads up to an altogether novel descriptive analysis of the Unemployed of to-day, who they actually are, and what they really need. The final chapter on Proposals for Reform gives, in elaborate detail, the Minority’s plan for solving the whole problem of Unemployment—not by any vague and chimerical panacea, but by a series of administratively practicable reforms, based on the actual experience of this and other countries, which are within the compass of the Cabinet, and could, if desired, be carried in a single session of Parliament.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
The State and the Doctor
In this work a great deal that will be new to the ordinary citizen is brought to light. The authors show that we do a great deal of State Doctoring in England—more than is commonly realised—and that our arrangements have got into a tangle, which urgently needs straightening out. Everywhere there is a duplication of authorities, and more or less overlapping of work. We are spending out of the rates and taxes, in one way or another, directly on sickness and Public Health, a vast sum of money annually—no man knows how much, but it certainly amounts to six or seven millions sterling. Meanwhile, as is now being revealed to us, a vast amount of sickness goes altogether untreated, with the result of grave damage to our population, and unnecessary loss of productive capacity to the community as a whole.
The authors suggest that we put up with this waste, and we allow our statesmen to postpone the task of straightening out the tangle, very largely because we are not aware of the facts. There has hitherto been no popular description of our State Doctoring. Many worthy people, thinking themselves educated, do not even know of its existence. There is not even an official report setting forth exactly what is being done and left undone for sickness and the Public Health in the different parts of the kingdom.
But the authors do not content themselves with a picture of the costly and wasteful muddle that our responsible statesmen allow, session after session, to continue unreformed. The work concludes with a remarkable series of proposals for “straightening out the tangle”—proposals based on the very authoritative evidence received by the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, supported not only by the administrators, but also by a large section of the medical profession, and rapidly commending themselves to the unprejudiced enquirer.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.