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detail, various schemes were put about for buying out the companies and centralizing water administration. Towards the close of the session of 1879 Mr. Fawcett moved a resolution pledging the House of Commons to deal effectually with these questions; and on the part of the Government the Home Secretary accepted the duty, acknowledged its urgency, and undertook in the recess to mature a measure that would give Parliament the opportunity without further delay of conferring the control if not the ownership of metropolitan water works upon some competent and responsible public authority. What the nature of that authority should be in each metropolitan city, or whether there should be one only having jurisdiction over all The Ten, the minister did not say. Possibly the Government had not come to any definite conclusion on the matter; and in the absence of popular opinion strongly pronounced on the various alternatives that presented themselves, the mind of a Home Secretary is liable to be swayed more or less unconsciously by the tendencies of bureaucracy which encompass him on every side and that are always in favour of centralization. Mr. E. J. Smith, for many years Receiver for the Northern Estates of the Crown, and one of the permanent surveyors for the Ecclesiastical Commission, a man of great ability and experience, undertook to negotiate the simultaneous purchase of the stock, effects, and tenant right of the eight water companies and the "unification of future supply under Government management."^[1] A report upon the state of the various works, made by Colonel (now Sir Francis) Bolton^[2] as water examiner under the Act of 1871, declared it to be "essential that an abundant supply of water of good quality should be given to the metropolis at the lowest possible cost. The advantages of the service and control of such a supply being vested in one authority only instead of in many were numerous; it being of course intended that this authority should be one that would represent the Government and be responsible to Parliament alone. There was nothing in the character of such an organization that a public authority invested with stringent powers could not administer more efficiently and more economically than it was possible for private associations to do. It being assumed that it was the

1. Evidence before Select Committee, July 9, 1880.
2. In a confidential letter to E. J. Smith, December 15, 1879.