and in the smallest of England's provincial guildhalls. Mayors and their colleagues, being as human as the same gentlemen in the twentieth century, had yielded to temptation and become transformed into close and determined oligarchies. Increase of population in a borough tended to increase the power of the dominant body and lessen the cohesion of the governed. With the removal of the monasteries and their educative influences, another check on the scarlet-gowned gentry in office passed away. The minds of the

tax-paying community lay fallow, or begat only inoffensive weeds of discontent in the diminishing amount of useful leisure that remained to them. They kept their bodies in fine condition with wrestlings and archery aud quarter-staves, but it was beyond them to criticise intelligently the doings of their masters. They were the inferiores, and the scarlet-gowned score or so in the guildhall were the potentiores; and only by a devotion to trade which left them little vigour or inclination to revolt could they hope in time to be admitted to that august company of publicans and sinners. For then, as now, the licensed victuallers got a firm clutch on the sweets of office; and then, as it may be in the future, the opportunity of bleeding the commonalty in the interests of a nefarious few was found to be irresistible. Even in the fourteenth century symptoms of a dangerous monopoly of the headship in the boroughs had appeared; Nicolas Langton was in 1342 elected Mayor of York for the seventeenth time.

But in the sixteenth century the King, as the great monopolist, put an end to the old free civic institutions. He pocketed England's towns and cities and established the precedent of using them and their parliamentary representatives for his own tyrannical

purposes. The precedent had a long innings. The liberties of the boroughs were not restored until the Reform Bill of 1832. It was quite reasonable that Dr. Brady should in 1690 write a big book to make it clear to everyone that the right of election of members of parliament was vested in the mayor and aldermen and only the chief burgesses of corporations, not in the citizens at large. The commonalty had so long been poor pawns for great folks to play with that they aspired to do no more than live with as little discomfort as might be. They had few innate rights and privileges to realise outside their own houses. Small wonder that where, in spite of the sophistries of time-serving Dr. Bradys, they had the power of helping to send a representative to parliament, they combined only to make the price as high a one as the candidates could be induced to pay. In all other matters as touching their own interests, whether as subjects or citizens, they were a disconnected and ignorant crowd. Parliament had no option but to tax them to the uttermost, and locally, if they had a mayor and corporation, they accepted the mystery without an effort to understand it. Their civic rulers finessed with circumstances placidly enough. The word progress was a battle-cry rather for individual encouragement in those days. National taxation was severe, but civic rates were kept low.

Our local Red Books and Blue Books and Yellow Books tell a different tale. They show our modern mayors and town-councillors as very resolute applicants of this same blessed word progress to all the fields of municipal enterprise in which they have the right to labour. Their predecessors of long ago lived gently for the moment; it seemed to them that each generation should bear its own burdens. It is otherwise with the present race of

municipal governors; they cannot look too far ahead. Bills of costs do not terrify them so long as they can rely on the eloquence or sophistries of their town-clerks to persuade the Home Office experts that their enterprises are sufficiently plausible. If the town be small, it is argued that it will promptly grow in the strength of these designed improvements. If the town's deathrate be rather above the average, there is no opposing the plea that this is due to sanitary arrangements which demand to be superseded. Having made up their corporate mind to an expenditure, nothing is allowed to stop the way, not the groans of anonymous scribes in the local paper, nor leading articles, nor the still small scruples which continue to whisper in their own consciences. Costly measures sanctioned when trade is exceptionally good begin to be paid for when trade is exceptionally bad, thereby making trade still worse. From one standpoint it is the picturesque irresponsibility of the spendthrift; but from another point of view it is not so picturesque. The children of the poor eat bread without butter and go breakfastless to school that the town may rejoice in the prettiest kind of municipal tramway system, in elegant municipal markethalls, public parks, slaughter-houses which the butchers cannot be persuaded to use, dazzling electric lamps, cold store establishments, and a succession of experiments in pavements and road material which delight the contractors and disturb everyone else.

The burgesses lament faintly and submit. They seem as irresponsible as their well-meaning but incompetent and impetuous rulers. It is the business of all of them to have a voice in the disposal of the tens of thousands of pounds which are annually taken from their tills and pockets; but some are too fiercely endeavouring to

keep out of the bankruptcy court to have any time to devote to public agitation; others drown care in the public-houses, or at the music-halls and football-matches which are as conventional features of the modern town as an alarming improvement rate; others are too lazy, too timid or too exasperated to protest sanely against the accumulation of extravagances. The town has had little difficulty in borrowing half a million or a million of money for its past adventures in municipal progress. It hopes to continue the pastime, and go on garnishing itself with palatial frills and fripperies. The burgesses are encouragingly patient upon the whole. Either on demand or after

a

summons, they pay their local exactions of about fifty shillings a head for every man, woman and child in the borough, and content the towncouncil and the Guardians of the Poor. Or they fail without any particular fuss and disappear, and other sanguine citizens come obligingly into the town and take their place, attracted, as the town's rulers had foreseen, by just these manifold tokens of a truly progressive borough which made the last straw of the burden that broke the backs of the men whose place they fill.

This is no fairy tale, nor even a somewhat fanciful sketch of the ambitions and consequent emotions of the modern borough. It is a conventionally true portraiture. One is driven to think that the mayor, alderman, and councillors of the modern borough could hardly be a worse infliction if they were an association of bandits who had taken possession of the council chamber by force and decided to oppress the citizens to the very limits of their endurance. They are nothing like that, of course, but their achievements belie them. A certain amount of

compassion is due to them indeed, or would be if they kept the pains and penalties of their greatness to themselves. Many of them wear themselves out prematurely in a vain yearning to do justice equally to their own private concerns and the town's. These are the weaklings, the handy material for the more irresponsible few to work upon in the furtherance of those schemes of municipalised trading which are so inevitably

attractive. Our modern boroughs are like a desperate gambler at Monte Carlo. They have gone so far that they cannot without an abject avowal of failure either stop or recede. They are committed to a system. The money squandered and largely lost upon one enterprise must be recovered somehow; and hence comes the greedy and astonishing desire to take the very bread from the mouths of ratepayers by competing with them upon an unfair advantage in their own poor little industries. It is so easy to make up a flattering tale in justification of such interference. The mayor and his council feel a paternal anxiety about the quality of the bread and milk and vegetables with which the town's citizens are supplied. They are not at all satisfied that these comestibles are the best obtainable and-so forth. Having got this thin (or not very thin) edge of the wedge well under the body corporate of the town, what more simple than to proceed to a course of monopolies which shall in time reduce two-thirds of the town's tradesmen to the position of salaried managers, or paid dependents, of the town-council? Every extension of public action limits the sphere of private action": this dictum of Herbert Spencer's will have no influence upon a town-council fully committed to its career of philanthropic piracy; for it will be argued that it would be

better for the degraded tradesmen to have a fixed salary as managers (and far more satisfactory to their wives) than to continue to grapple with the changes and chances of good trade and bad and their attendant phantoms of extravagant living and the bankruptcy Court. One may reasonably go a little farther still with this forecast. When a town council attempts to manage a town as if it were just so many departments of a huge store like Whiteley's, it will have to offer a course of pleasing sops to the common folk to persuade them that they are by no means so uncomfortably in bonds of servitude to their rulers. The hospitals, theatres, musichalls and leading football-clubs will be taken up by the municipality as well as the butchers' and bakers' shops. Free admission to footballmatches will go a long way to soothe the feelings of the multitude, even if the sublime oligarchy in command find themselves forced by circumstances (the Bank rate, for example) to go back on their earlier declarations of benevolence and unduly raise the price of chops and loaves. As for the integrity of the individual members of a town-council in this swollen state of importance, one must be a little more or less than human to expect it to be spotless. Opportunity makes the thief, alike with unhinged managing directors of tottering companies, Spitalfields pickpockets, and imperial autocrats. It were vain for a somewhat needy town-councillor at the head of a committee which handled millions a year to pray daily "Lead us not into temptation," when the temptation of innumerable feats of remunerative jobbery battered at his virtue every working day of his life.

But enough. Things are not likely to be allowed to come to so monstrous a climax. It would be

the Middle Ages over again in certain of its (to us) most amusing aspects. Up to a point, local self-government is as necessary as it is wise and honourably developing. Westminster has been generous to the provinces, but it must not be as extravagant and foolish as the boroughs show every tendency of becoming. Having been generous almost to the degree of folly, it must now consider how best to restrain the hands of the irresponsible gentlemen who find themselves in control of such astonishingly irresponsible citizens as these of the twentieth century. Seeing that they are unable to take care of themselves, the latter must be taken care of lest they be insidiously choked with good things which they cannot digest.

One may learn wisdom, of a sort, even from babes. In this matter it is suggestive to remember how things are managed even in so petty, yet prosperous, a State as the little Republic of San Marino. For hundreds of years it has been the custom there to elect a learned and immaculate stranger to the second rank in the State. He comes after the Regents, who are the worshipful figure-heads in San Marino. To him are comImitted the control of the law-courts and sundry other offices of the most eminently practical kind. His alien origin and limited term of office combine with his previous character as guarantees of his impartiality and wisdom. He is required to be wholly free from prejudices; so much so indeed that when a San Marino young lady desires to enter a nunnery, it is his duty to go to her, and, as

advocatus diaboli, address her seriously and explain to her in the most per suasive language possible what a formidable step she is about to take in thus surrendering the charms of the world and the possible pleasures of motherhood. Where her father and mother may have failed the State Commissioner may succeed.

Our municipalities have had great powers given to them which many of them have abused. It is a matter of national importance that these should either be revised, or the citizens whom they govern stimulated to take an active and intimate interest in their own affairs. might be done by the establishment in every considerable borough of a Crown Officer somewhat similar to the Commissioner of San Marino or the Podestá of the old Italian republics. publics.

This

The town-clerk might not

like it, but that would be a grievance for the town-clerk alone. The commonalty would benefit inasmuch as it would be this new official's business to work solely in their interest, and he would be answerable for delinquencies or errors to the Home Office only. With his discreet hand in check upon the impertinent interference of municipalities with the money market, our national credit would have a chance of re-establishing itself. Consols would continue to rise, and the Red Books and Blue Books and Yellow Books of the municipalities would no longer be as beguiling in their statements of accounts as the balance sheets of a company like the late lamented London and Globe Finance Corporation.

CHARLES EDWARDES.

I.

O HARA SAN was in the garden picking irises. It was not an easy task, for the purple flags rose gracefully from several inches of water, and great care was necessary to avoid unsightly splashes. Not desirous of being splashed O Hara San had carefully tucked up her gay dress, and the shortened skirt revealed the prettiest feet imaginable, thrust into the inevitable wooden clogs.

A shaft of sunlight came striking through the bamboo hedge, and touched with glory the little maid's dark hair. The delicate tints of her dress blended into the brilliant carpet of the iris bed, and the faint bloom of her cheek would have rivalled the

rosy petals of the cherry-blossom, but the season of cherry-blossom was over. As she stood, airily perched on a moss-grown stone, her slender form bending to meet the upturned flowers, she might have stepped straight off a Japanese fan, only indeed no painted figure was ever half so charming.

Above the garden walls towered the giant cryptomeria trees, and beyond again were the mountains, all blue and mysterious, half veiled in morning mist.

O Hara San sang as she worked, and the little grey lizards crept out into the sun to listen. It was a mournful song, a story of love and revenge, but she had no knowledge of either, as yet, and sang merrily.

Suddenly, from a temple near, the great bell struck the hour, firm, solemn strokes, fraught with Time's warning signal, and little O'Hara San stayed

her hand to count: "Yo-ji, Go-ji," in the quaint Japanese tongue, "Rokuji, Shichi-ji.” ▲ But as the last note fined off into silence, she turned in alarm, for a footstep sounded on the path beside her, an unusual occurrence in this secluded spot. It was not the soft shuffling of bare feet, nor the click-clack of clogs, but the unmistakable tread of civilised leather. O Hara San's foolish little heart beat with a vague fear. There was nothing to be afraid of in the newcomer's appearance, however; he was young and an Englishman, and he regarded her with kindly interest.

2

She dropped her eyes, and bowed low, again and again; a difficult feat when one is balanced on a stone in the midst of a water-field, but the stranger's gravity was unruffled as he returned the salutation. "O'Hayo," " he ventured cheerfully. "O'Hayo," she made answer, and her gentle tones sounded like the cooing of a wood-pigeon in contrast. After this conversation languished. Shyness on O Hara San's part, ignorance of the language on the young man's, held them silent. Then she, with her sheaf of iris blooms clasped to her breast, prepared for flight, and the Englishman, fearing to lose this pretty butterfly creature, surreptitiously consulted his guide-book, and rattled off a sentence with great aplomb. Eastern nations are renowned for the perfection of their manners, but the Japanese are gifted with a sense of humour, and O Hara San was no exception.

1 Four, five, six, seven. 2 Good-morning.