this class should strive to obtain control as well of the local institutions of the country. This is what they did and did successfully. The succeeding years were marked by the passage of legislation which has greatly modified English local institutions. The most important of the acts passed are the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, afterward codified with its amendments in the Consolidated Municipal Corporations Act of 1882, the Consolidated Public Health Act of 1875, and the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894.

The most important effects of this legislation on English local government are three in number:

In the first place, the whole system has been made much more democratic in character. At the present time almost all the important local authorities are councils, such as the county council, the parish council, and the borough council, having jurisdiction over particular local districts. These councils are elected by the taxpayers of the districts. But as taxes are paid by reason of occupation rather than the ownership of a house or land, practically all adult occupiers of houses and land have the right to vote.

In the second place, the sphere of local activity has, on the whole, been enlarged. This is due to the fact that local government legislation has become somewhat more general and liberal in character. The old idea of a special act conferring local powers has been in a measure abandoned, and the general acts give, particularly in the case of the boroughs, wider powers than were formerly possessed. Thus many boroughs at the present time have their own waterworks, their own tramways, their own electric-light plants, their own markets,

and so on, while the increasing density of the population has made it seem desirable to grant very wide powers to be exercised for the protection of the public health and safety.

Finally, the actions of local authorities, even within the limits of the law, have been subjected to a central administrative control to be exercised by the Local Government Board at London, established in 1871, to supervise the administration of the poor law, the public health, and the local finances of the various local districts.

The English system of local government remains, however, in its main features fundamentally the same as it has always been. That is, it is a system of local selfgovernment in which the local people have within the limits of acts of Parliament a great influence over the detailed administration of local affairs.

The administrative centralization of the last century of development has consisted in the assumption by the central government, rather of the right of supervising the operations of the local authorities than of the actual management of local activities. For the most part the real power of decision is exercised by locally elected officers who may, however, be obliged by the central authority to maintain a certain fixed standard of efficiency.

It is, however, to be noticed that the system of local government is not so closely associated as formerly. with the central governmental organization. Thus the boroughs as boroughs no longer send representatives to Parliament. The citizen of a borough does not merely, because of his local citizenship, have the Parliamentary suffrage. As a general thing, nevertheless, borough

voters and Parliamentary voters are from the same classes; and it never should be forgotten that Parliamentary or Constitutional Government in England developed in close connection with the local institutions. It is only as one understands these local institutions that one can comprehend the origin of constitutional government which, as we have seen, developed in the England of the centuries preceding the close of the eighteenth century.

XXIV

THE LOCAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES

THE

HE British settlers of North America brought with them the local institutions of the mother country, and upon these as a foundation they built their own system of local government.

In the first place they provided a decentralized administrative system; in the second place they laid even more emphasis than the English had laid, prior to the nineteenth century, upon the popular election of local officers; in the third place they accorded to the colonial, later the state, legislature the same power that had been possessed by the British Parliament to determine by law the organization and powers of the local districts and their officers; finally, they made a distinction between the government of cities and the open districts.

The declaration of the independence of the colonies and their organization as sovereign states brought about little, if any, change in their local institutions, while the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, in 1789, affected hardly at all the position and powers of the local districts and the local officers that existed in the separate states.

Among the powers not granted by the United States Constitution to the central government which it established-powers, therefore, reserved by the states-was the power to organize their own local institutions as they

saw fit. The original thirteen states have had added to their number as the result of American political development more than thirty new states. Each of these states has the same powers with regard to its local institutions, which are possessed by the original thirteen. As a result there are a number of different systems of local government, although the fundamental characteristics of these systems may be said to be substantially the same as those which were to be found a century and a quarter ago in both the original thirteen states and in England itself.

The various systems of local government in the United States differ one from the other mainly in the importance which is accorded to the county or the town, the two main local districts.

Throughout the South and the West it is the county to which has been intrusted the discharge of most of the functions of local government. It is the county which has charge of the preservation of the peace, of the administration of roads and bridges, of the support of the poor, often of the care of the schools and of the registration of documents affecting the title to land, and it is the county which must bear the expense of the judicial administration.

In the northeastern-that is, the New England-states these duties are for the most part imposed upon the town, which is smaller in area than the county.

In some of the Middle States, like New York, a compromise has been reached in which both the county and town are used in such a way that the functions of local government are divided between the two areas.

In all the states, however, without exception, a distinction is still made between the open country and the