1888 he introduced the local government bill (for England and Wales) into the House of Commons, in a speech which Gladstone called 'a very frank, a very lucid, and a very able statement.' It was a complicated measure, with its 162 clauses, its five schedules, and its eighty folio pages of amendments. The general aim almost amounted to a social revolution. In place of the nominated magistrates who in quarter sessions had hitherto managed the business of the county it established for administrative purposes councils elected by the ratepayers to be independent of any but parliamentary control. Their business was to include the levying of county rates, the maintenance of roads and hedges, lunatic asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, registration, weights and measures, and such matters as adulteration of food and drugs. The management of the county police, meanwhile, was transferred to a joint committee of quarter sessions and the county council, the appointment of chief constable remaining with quarter sessions. Together with the sanitary authorities already existing, the county councils were to enforce the provisions of the Rivers Pollution Act ; and all such powers of the local government board as related to piers, harbours, electric lighting, gas and water, tramways, the administration of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, the settlement of boundary disputes, and so on, were to be transferred to them. They were also to have the power to promote emigration by making advances to emigrants, and their adininistration of funds raised by the imperial executive was further widened by the power to increase the contribution towards the cost of maintaining indoor paupers. The act further provided for the distribution of the 'county' — a geographical unit to be retained, as far as possible, as it existed — into equal electoral divisions, with one member for each, the number of divisions being fixed by the local government board, and the council being purely elective with co-opted aldermen.
London received separate treatment in the bill. Together with certain other large towns it was made a county in itself, and an elected council, with co-opted aldermen, superseded the Metropolitan Board of Works. The metropolitan police, however, were left under the control of the home office, as being a national and not a municipal force, and the City of London proper was to remain the same as a quarter sessions borough. While many of its administrative duties were transferred to the London county council the City Corporation was exempted from the general condemnation of all unreformed corporations.
As originally drafted Ritchie's bill provided for the creation of district councils and included a readjustment of the licensing laws, making the county councils the licensing authority and authorising them to refuse the renewal of licences, with compensation to the licence holder. These clauses, which embodied the principle of compensation for interference with public houses, and so recognised a legal vested interest on the part of the licence-holder, were warmly contested by the temperance party, and, after considerable discussion, they were dropped (June 12). The establishment of district councils was relinquished also ; but under the Local Government Act of 1894 this part of Ritchie's work was completed six years later by the liberals.
Some extreme tories, particularly in the City of London, censured the bill, but its reception was generally favourable as being 'a great work of safe and moderate decentralisation' bound to 'reinvigorate the local energies of our people' (The Times, 20 March 1888). Ritchie's management of its complicated details in committee, his mastery of every point and phase of it, his good temper, and his clearness in explanation, constituted a parliamentary achievement of the first order, and when the bill was read a third time and passed on 27 July 1888, Sir William Harcourt, amid universal cheering, paid a warm tribute to the 'ability, the conciliatory temper, and the strong common -sense ' he had displayed (Hansard, vol. 329, 3rd series). The bill received the royal assent on 13 Aug. 1888, and came into force next year. A similar bill for Scotland became law in Aug. 1889. In addition to the Local Government Act, Ritchie was responsible, while at the local government board, for the Allotments Acts of 1887 and 1890; for the Infectious Diseases Notification Act of 1889 ; and for the Housing of the Working Classes Amendment and Consolidation Acts of July 1890. His power of mastering and classifying enormous masses of detail was again shown in his two Public Health Acts, involving the vast and complicated machinery which controls the sanitary condition of London. The first of these, introduced on 8 April 1891, was a consolidation bill which put in order the chaos of twenty-nine Acts already treating of the subject ; the second
