Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE SMALLER ADMINISTRATIVE AREAS AND THEIR SEVERAL AUTHORITIES. Organizations, other than that of the County, do by far the greater part of the work of local government. A single type may perhaps be discovered amid their variations ; but the type is faint, and the variations manifold, intricate, irrational, and vexatious beyond description. These variations rarely have the charm of antiquity, for almost all have grown up within the possible compass of a single human life. They have not the justification of usefulness, for they have not their root in clear or comprehensive principles of any kind. All the formal vices of English legislation, the unreasonable limitation, the bad drafting, the mangling which is called amendment, the hundreds of lengthy reported cases, often obscure, and sometimes conflicting, which is called elucidation,—all these are most abundantly illustrated in the Acts of Parliament and judicial decisions which deal with the subject of this chapter. In the preface to his admirable little book upon "Local Government," Mr. Chalmers tells us that there areabout 650 Acts, or fragments of Acts, of general application to local affairs ; that these public Acts are supplemented by some thousands of local and special Acts, which apply to particular towns and districts, and accumulate at the rate of about sixty a year. After this the reader will learn with a sense of resignation that even the total number of local authorities cannot be clearly ascertained. The local taxation returns, last published, do not acknowledge the existence of much over 13,000 local authorities for England and Wales, but Mr. Chalmers, reckoning in all parish overseers, states the total of those which levy rates at upwards of 27,000. Such is the machinery judged needful for adminis...