top. It exists, however, for the moment, and, for our present purpose, we can only take it as it is, especially as it exists with a clearness and a precision which leave no room for doubt and which show us what is the function of men in the management of the actual form of French democracy.

It can scarcely be pretended by anybody-not even by the Radicals-that the men of France are now serving their country usefully. Most of the Conservatives are half asleep (though some of them talk a good deal, as if to make believe that they are awake), while the work the Radicals are doing is directed avowedly to the supposed benefit of a certain part of the population by the persecution and the enfeeblement of the rest. And between these two extremes there appears to be no place for moderate Republicans, for men with an honest desire to save the Republic by rendering it reasonable and therefore acceptable. Nobody appears desirous to maintain what is. Both Radicals and Conservatives wish to crush each other out, but by different means; one side uses steady acts, the other side seems to have at its disposal nothing more formidable than unsteady words.

Under such conditions it is evident that, if the future were to be judged exclusively by the present purposes and the present ways of men, it would be difficult to conceive that France can be saved from a convulsion. But the purposes and the ways of men are not unchangeable. Other agencies may come into play, and though it is a poor ground of hope to be obliged to count on the unforeseen and the improbable, there is no other direction in which we can look for a solution of the difficulties against which France is struggling.

Meanwhile, she stands before Europe isolated, discredited, and mistrusted. Her government is unstable, her Parliament unrespected, her people dissatisfied, her temper fretful. Her finances are in disorder; her debt is increasing; and yet new expenditure is constantly called for. Her present is full of troubles, difficulties and quarrels ; her future offers no hope of calm. At home she is torn by party conflicts and by class enmities; abroad she is regarded with suspicion and ill-will, as a standing danger to her neighbours. The French themselves proclaim all this to the world, and seem almost to find a pleasure in asking the world to take note of it.

And this is what the actual generation of Frenchmen has made of France.

FREDERICK MARSHALL.

'IMPERIUM IN IMPERIO.

It may seem rather premature and ungracious in me to begin complaining of an important part of the Local Government Act before any of it has come into operation, and all the more so because I hailed it on its second reading as a great and comprehensive measure, giving, what I had commenced advocating more than thirty years before, a just control to representatives of the ratepayers over the expenditure of the county rates. I must however add, in justice to myself, that I did in the same speech earnestly protest against the mode then proposed (and, I regret to say, carried after comparatively little discussion) for dealing with the management of the metropolis. I then urged that it was not prudent, nor in conformity with the general practice of other countries in different ages, to treat a capital like an ordinary town, and especially to treat the capital of the British Empire, our huge metropolis-far the largest city in the world, with its vast population of more than four million souls crowded round the seat of the Imperial Legislature and the Imperial Government as if there were nothing very special or exceptional in its character, circumstances, and requirements; as if it could be safely dealt with on the same principles as other great towns in the kingdom; as if it ought to be constituted into a county of a city like any other, differing from the rest in little else than its greater size and population. It would, indeed, be not only ungracious, but futile and unreasonable, in me to lament over this new and comprehensive legislative work, if I really believed it to be not only irrevocable as a whole (which I do), but also unalterable in all its parts, and the dangers. involved in one portion only of it, though a very important one, to be insusceptible of removal or much diminution, except by a complete reconstruction of the whole measure. My object, on the contrary, is to show that most of what I deprecate could easily be amended without any infringement of the general principle of the Act or probable detriment to the efficiency of its working.

The question of the local government of London is one in which I have long taken a deep interest. In fact, it had been forced upon my attention during my diligent attendance for several years, first as a member, and latterly as Chairman, of the Consolidated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, superseding the seven separate Commissions, which had previously managed (or rather mismanaged) the seven VOL. XXIV.-No. 140.

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districts into which the metropolis had been divided. Indeed, not long after resigning that unpaid, but laborious, office, I had published a pamphlet on Representative Local Self-Government for the Metropolis. In that, after describing the administrative confusion, uncertainty, and anomalies resulting from the variety of boundaries, and the multiplicity of jurisdictions to be found therein, I ventured to make some suggestions for dealing with the problem-suggestions founded on my experience not or of the work above mentioned, but also of local government generally, as Secretary to the Poor Law Board from its establishment till 1852, and, I may add, as a Chairman of Quarter Sessions for some years, and of a Board of Guardians for many more.

I should not, however, have mentioned these suggestions-which, though I still believe them sound, subsequent legislation has rendered completely inapplicable-but for this: Shortly after their publication, I was invited to stand, and returned after an exciting contest by an unprecedented majority, for the great constituency of Marylebone, which then comprised the two populous parishes of Marylebone and St. Pancras, and that also of Paddington. And I was returned in spite of the vehement opposition of their two vestries, who indefatigably quoted my pamphlet against me with its earnest deprecation of a single governing body for the metropolis. My triumphant majority proved conclusively that at that time the views which I then advocated, as I do now, were not so very objectionable to one at least of the largest metropolitan constituencies. Nay, more, my subsequent opposition to what Charles Dickens happily called 'the Act for the more complete vestralisation of the metropolis,' embodying the principle which I had deprecated in my pamphlet, and deprecate in the present much larger measure, was apparently not at all distasteful to most of my constituents; for at the next general election they returned me unopposed, while I was still an invalid at Rome, hardly as yet allowed to read or write at all. Too much importance ought not of course to be attached to these indications of the feelings of Londoners more than thirty years ago, but they can hardly be without some significance even now.

The recent disclosure of systematic corruption in some parts of the administration of the Metropolitan Board of Works (though their chairman and most of the members seem to have been personally untainted) appears to have contributed even more than their costly mismanagement of other parts of their business, such as that of the sewerage, to dispose the Legislature to supersede them as speedily as possible. This seemingly accounts for the rapidity with which the clauses of the Local Government Bill relating to the metropolis were passed, and the comparatively small amount of discussion which they elicited. The feeling apparently was that almost any kind of body that could be proposed would be preferable to the one which had so discredited itself; and that it would be better to accept the Government's simple

scheme than to wait for a more carefully prepared one, or even to incur delay by discussing that at any length. To me, the disclosures were not surprising. I had predicted, while the Metropolitan Local Management Act was under discussion in 1855, that the representative body established by it would do its work, especially as regards the sewers, extravagantly and ill, and I feared too probably not without jobbery. I must confess, however, that the Metropolitan Board of Works, while verifying these, honourably falsified another of my anticipations. Judging from the line long taken by some of the London vestries, and especially by those of Marylebone and St. Pancras, who used to devote much time to questions of Imperial policy, domesti and foreign, while shamefully neglecting their parochial business (as was shown, for instance, by the shocking mortality in their workhouses), I foretold that the Metropolitan Board would probably bestow much attention on Imperial politics. It must be entirely exonerated from ever having given any ground for complaint on that score. It should be remembered, however, that the body was not a very large one, and that its members were not directly chosen by the ratepayers-on the contrary, they were selected by the different vestries, which had been elected by the ratepayers.

What I chiefly urged then, and have urged from time to time since whenever the question arose of superseding the Metropolitan Board of Works and the Corporation of the City by some new body or bodies, and what I earnestly urged in the House of Lords this year, was the danger (a very real one, I feel convinced) of giving to any one elective body representing the vast population concentrated round the seat of the Imperial Legislature and Executive a necessarily habitual undue political influence, and in particular cases a possibly, nay probably, overwhelming one.

I wrote in 1854 that, before entering upon the question what kind of representative local self-government ought to be given to London, I felt I ought to inquire a little into the organisation of ancient and modern capitals. And I went on to say, 'I find that the necessity of special legislation, or rather of State-regulation, for capitals, as distinguished from mere provincial towns, was distinctly recognised when Constantinople became the seat of the Eastern Empire-for, as such, that city had many of its local concerns regulated by the Emperors Theodosius, Justinian, and others in a series of laws hardly less exceptional and metropolitan in their character than those settled within the memory of men yet (in 1854) living by the founders of the federal government for their new capital, Washington.'

There is on this 'the concurrent testimony of many countries and many ages."

The state of things in London at the time of Lord George Gordon's riots was too dissimilar to that in 1854 to allow me then to

1 Representative Local Self-Government for the Metropolis, 1854, p. 22.

cite them, so I only cited the example of Paris since the commencement of the Revolution at the end of the last century as a warning. But if I had written a little later I might have instanced the tumultuous outbreak which caused the sudden withdrawal of the Sunday Trading Bill in 1855, though it had passed through its earlier stages with little opposition. Eleven years later, in 1866, we had the Reform riots in Hyde Park, and the destruction of the railings there, and witnessed the attitude of the then Government, and especially of the Home Secretary, on the occasion; nor should the mob's triumphant window-breaking march through part of the West-end immediately after Mr. Gladstone's resumption of office in 1886 be altogether forgotten. History becomes a mere ld almanac if its examples and warnings are utterly unheeded.

And now, having mentioned Paris, it may be well to describe very shortly what elaborate precautions were taken by King Louis Philippe and his ministers in 1834 to prevent any municipal body or official person there from being able to speak or act as the sole representative of the people of Paris. The duties discharged in the rest of France by the Crown-appointed préfet of a Department with his Conseil Général and Conseil Municipal, were carefully divided there between two highly paid Crown-appointed préfets. Those relating to municipal works, such as streets, buildings, sewerage, &c., were entrusted to the Préfet de la Seine and the Conseil Municipal; while those relating to what may be called the municipal, as distinguished from the national, government of persons in Paris, such as the management of the police and fire-brigade, the regulation of prisons, vagrant asylums, and madhouses, and of the street traffic, vehicles, &c., were assigned to the Préfet de Police.

That the King, who had taken such a share in the preparation of this able and ingenious plan for minimising the political influence, as distinguished from the administrative efficiency, of the municipal bodies and official persons engaged in the management of Paris, was nevertheless ignominiously dethroned only fourteen years after he had given the royal assent to it, when it had passed through both Chambers, seems justly attributable rather to his blindness and vacillation than to any defect in the law. Anyhow, there can be but little doubt that the Parisians have ceased to dominate over the rest of France at all in the way they at one time used.

We have seen how a London mob more than thirty years ago induced the Legislature suddenly to reverse its action with regard to a particular measure. We have since seen it twice, at intervals of one and two decades respectively, for a short time successfully defy the law within a limited area, doing serious damage to property and causing much alarm. We have since, within this last year, seen illegal meetings held in Trafalgar Square, countenanced and attended by certain legislators, which required to be forcibly suppressed by the police--that admirable force which has been happily left in London