LOCAL GOVERMENT.

Patea Mail, 22 March 1882, Page 3

LOCAL GOVERMENT.

The hon. Mr Chamberlain, M.P., and mayor of Birmingham, recently said : Local government is not merely the great instrument for promoting the comfort and the happiness of the people, but it is also the political education of the nation, I suppose that in Great Britain alone at the present time there may be no less than one hundred thousand persons engaged giving voluntary and unpaid labour as Town Councillors, as Guardians, as members ot School Boards, as Commissioners, as Magistrates, as I know not what, in various capacities connected with our local government ; and these men are not only engaged in taking part in the government of their country,“hut they are learning the routine of public business, the nature of office work, and they are learning above all how to obtain their objects by constitutional means, by free discuscussion, and by mutual concession. If in England, in contradistinction to other countries, progress has been accomplished without revolution ; if great changes have been effected slowly, it is true —too slowly I would venture in the face of Mr Aiderman Avery to say sometimes, without disorder and without violence, it is due to the dicipline of our local government and the experience which we and the public have obtained of the working of our free institutions. We have become under this system during the last half century a nation of separate self-governing communities. In all the great towns these important corporate bodies exist, exercising, with the free consent of all the burgesses, paramount authority over every member of the community in regard to many questions deeply and closely affecting the lives, and the health, and the education of the people. I contrast our work with that which has been so famous—the great municipalities of Italy and Belgium, which played so large a partin the civilisation of those two countries, and 1 find that we excel them greatly in the numbers that we have had to do with, in the extent of our revenues, and in the magnitude of our operations. We rival them in our love of liberty and freedom, and if we fall behind, as I am afraid we must confess we do, in our intelligent appreciation of art and in the picturesqueness of onr life, at least, on the other hand, we minister to a hundred wants—humble wants—the necessities and the comforts of all classes of the population, and especially the poorest class, of which they had no sue* picion.