and when elected the thirty-six vestries should nominate respectively members of the central or executive board. It saved trouble to take the poor-law divisions as they then existed; and the minister in an off-hand way put aside the alternative of incorporating parliamentary boroughs upon the unarguable plea that they were too large. Size must be always a question of comparison; and it was obvious to the least informed of those who listened to the objection that it would apply as well to the great cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire as to those of Middlesex and Surrey; and this whether population or ratable property was taken as the test, or the two combined.
Lord Ebrington, Mr. Pellatt, and Mr. Williams, on behalf of their constituents in Southwark, Lambeth, and Marylebone, expressed their disapproval of cutting up the town into thirty-six divisions, termed in a passing way municipal, but which were really invested with no adequate municipal functions. The aggregate expenditure of such a system, they argued, would inevitably prove greater than that of seven or eight corporate bodies entrusted with plenary local authority; and against the correlative institution of a central board with a jurisdiction too wide for practical responsibility either to vestries or ratepayers, they entered more than one energetic protest. Nor were they wholly without support from members unconnected with the metropolis. Lord Barrington, Sir H. Willoughby, Sir F. Thesiger, and Mr. Mackinnon, looking at the matter impartially, discerned in the proposed measure the elements of weakness and evil likely to result from an abandonment of the time-honoured principle of local self-rule. Indirect election was an outlandish novelty, they said, which implied lack of faith in the spirit of native institutions; still worse was the jealous stipulation embodied in a clause giving to the Crown the right to name a chairman at £2000 a year, to which Sir W. Jolliffe shrewdly objected that its certain effect would be to enfeeble if not extinguish the sense of responsibility in the unpaid members of the board. The closest friends of Government staggered at this overweening effort to create another permanent and lucrative place, and at the instance of Lord R. Grosvenor it was struck out of the Bill. It is not unworthy of note that Sir G. C. Lewis, his wiser judgment being overruled by his colleagues in the
