reader of poetry reads it for the matter, not for the manner; and Carducci will cease in time to give that reader what he seeks, the reflection and interpretation of his own feelings. In pure literature what makes for lasting popularity is individual human interest. 'Maud' is read for the hero's love story, not for the author's opinions on the Crimean war and the Manchester school in economics; the emotional crises in the life of Jean Valjean make us bear with the political disquisitions in 'Les Misérables.' Now this human interest, present in Tennyson and Victor Hugo, is absent from Carducci. He never attempted the creation of character; and his own feelings expressed in verse are seldom of lyric intensity or such that all mankind can share them. His own reference in his 'Intermezzo' to

'Questo cuor, che amor mai non richiese,

Se non forse a le idee,' *

is rather too suggestive of Goethe's saying about Platen, that he had every other gift but wanted love. To enjoy what is best in the 'Odi Barbare' requires historic imagination and the knowledge that alone gives that imagination scope. In the marmoreal ode Sul' Adda,' for instance, there is an impressive reverie over departed conquerors not unworthy of Omar Khayyam; there is no throb of human passion as in Browning's 'Love among the Ruins.'

Carducci's fame will endure, but with the few, not with the many. His appeal in the future will be to those endowed with historic imagination and the still rarer literary perception needed to appreciate his mastery of poetic form. For readers so gifted, nowhere very numerous, the Odi Barbare' will become a classic in the truest sense, and Carducci will continue to be what Signor d'Annunzio has called him, in the Greeting to the Master' that closes the Laus Vitæ,' 'the mediator between two worlds,' that of ancient Rome and that of modern Italy.

J. SLINGSBY ROBERTS.

* This heart which no love ever claimed, save perhaps for ideas.

Art. II.-LOCAL GOVERNMENT.

1. The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer. By Richard Burn, LL.D., Chancellor of the Diocese of Carlisle, 1755. 2. The Local Government Act, 1888.

3. Local Government in England. By Josef Redlich and Francis W. Hirst. Two vols. London, Macmillan, 1903. 4. Local and Central Government, a Comparative Study of England, France, Russia, and the United States. By Percy Ashley. London, Murray, 1906.

5. English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act. The Parish and the County. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb. London: Longmans,

1906.

WHEN the political history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century comes to be written, it is certain that few things will occupy a larger space in it than the development of local government. That development has been immense. Whether it has been an unmixed advantage is a subject on which opinions may differ, but for good or for ill the extension of municipal government to the counties has brought about a change little short of a revolution. It may be that we live too near the time for any adequate account of the movement to be yet written. So far, in this country, there has been none. The best attempt is that of Herr Redlich, which Mr Hirst has translated and brought up to the English standpoint. The book, however, has one great fault, the usual fault of most of our writers on local government, it is written from the outside. For instance, whatever may be the theoretical view, no one who has sat at petty or quarter sessions would have stated that the struggles in regard to the settlement of paupers form an important part of the jurisdiction of Justices of the Peace.' In twenty-five years' experience of those courts we have never known a case occur at petty sessions, and only two at quarter sessions. In theory the law of settlement is most important, in practice few barristers' libraries contain the great authority on the subject, 'Burrows' Settlement Cases.'

6

Possibly the fact that the lawyer who writes books

has little practical experience in the actual working of his subject may be the reason why there is no really good modern work on the office and duties of the justice of the peace. There are plenty of books on the practice before justices. The well-known treatises by Oke and Stone have sufficed to point out to the justices the way in which they should go, and they have required nothing more. A really good, modern, trustworthy, history of the office and duties of the great unpaid is still a want in our literature. What Lambard and Dalton did for their generations we want some one to do for ours. The best available substitute is The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer,' by Richard Burn, the work, not of a lawyer, but of an active clerical justice, whose experience of the Westmorland Quarter Sessions made him a practical authority, securing for his book such a reputation that it has passed through upwards of thirty editions, and, although published over a century and a half ago, is still an accepted text-book. In some degree Mr Webb's work supplies this want, but it stops at the Reform era, and does not profess to give the developments of the last sixty years. Still, for the period it covers, it gives one of the best accounts we have of the way in which the magistrates, before the Reform Act of 1832, discharged their duties.

Among the changes then brought about probably the most far-reaching was the reform of the municipal corporations. The system then introduced into the towns has, by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, been extended to counties and country districts. Powers have been taken away from the justices and new powers heaped upon the new bodies. The tendency to give the county councils larger and larger powers is shown in the legislation of each year. Soon they will become, if they are not so already, the most powerful local bodies that have ever been in existence in England or in Europe. They have already gone beyond their predecessors the municipal corporations.

The fact that these powers are expressly granted to the new councils by Parliament and are not a survival of any old jurisdiction does not seem to be fully appreciated. Messrs Redlich and Hirst define local government as 'the carrying out by inhabitants of localities, or their elected representatives, of the duties and powers with which they

have been invested by the Legislature, or which devolve upon them at Common Law.'*

But no common law powers devolve on these statutory bodies; all their powers are derived by express statutory grant. If once they act outside the four corners of the statutes conferring their powers the courts will restrain their action. They possess no original jurisdiction, no common law powers. County councils cannot spend a farthing on any object however deserving unless some Act of Parliament empowers them to do so. For instance, they can pay for damage arising from wear and tear to a school-house, but not to a school-playground. They can pay the costs of opposing, but not of promoting Bills in Parliament. It is this principle, that if they act ultra vires the central power can at once step in and prevent any such action, that forms the best and greatest check on the conduct of local authorities. While the powers of local bodies in England are greater than those on the Continent, nowhere are local bodies kept so tightly within the strict letter of their powers as in England.

The story of the change from the old to the new order of things begins with the reform of the corporations in the towns and the poor-law system in the counties. The 246 towns to which the Municipal Corporation Act applied were, says Mr Ashley,† in the hands of an irresponsible oligarchy. Confusion and corruption were almost inevitable, the corporate funds and municipal offices were openly used for the individual benefit of members of the town councils or other freemen.'

All this that Act changed. It gave

'the municipal franchise to all ratepayers, made the councils elective, abolished life membership, put an end to trading monopolies and privileges, provided for a better system of appointments to salaried offices, secured publicity for all proceedings of the new authorities, and withdrew all judicial functions from the aldermen as such.' ‡

In the counties This had been based which had made each

This was the reform of the towns. the first reform was the poor law. on the statute of the 43 Elizabeth, parish responsible for its own poor, under the conditions

* Vol. i, p. xxiv.

† p. 218.

$ p. 221.

of society which prevailed in 1603, and the changes in land tenure and cultivation that two hundred years had produced rendered it quite unsuitable as a practical system for the nineteenth century.

'The poor rate' (says Mr Ashley) had come to be regarded by employers in country and town alike as a source of grants in aid of wages; . . the actual administration of relief was in the hands of small shopkeepers and farmers untrained in business habits and afraid of unpopularity; there was no central control.'

All this was changed by the Poor Law Act of 1834. The parish ceased to be the unit of responsibility, relief was no longer given by the parishioners. The administration was placed in the hands of elected bodies called Boards of Guardians, bodies to whom the justices of the peace living within the area of the union were added as ex-officio members. A strict central authority was established to supervise the regular administration of the poor law, and, not the least important point, the accounts of the guardians were annually audited.

With this change, and with changes in the power of granting licenses, and as to highways, the body that had been the most threatened of all, the county justices, passed safely through the storm of reform.

'All the efforts of the reformer' (says Mr Webb) ' were concentrated, not on reorganising the local government of the rural districts, but on stripping the rulers of the county of their powers, and either throwing away the control and supervision which these powers afforded, or else entrusting them to a department of the central government.'†

So the efforts failed.

With licensing Bills in the air, it is interesting to note the great effort of licensing of the reformed Parliament, the Beer-house Act of 1830, which enabled beer-shops to be set up without the assent of the justices. This power was at once largely exercised, and in six months no less than 26,000 new drinking dens were established. We who blame the justices for the number of licensed houses should remember that the increase was not their doing. The Highway Act of 1835 limited the justices' jurisdiction † Webb, p. 603.

*

p. 217.