promote the cause of municipal reform, but is
temperate and reliable. The second is especially
exhaustive, volume 3 containing probably the best
existing treatment of the history of borough
government. For a brief sketch see May and Holland,
Constitutional History of England, II., Chap. 15.]

V. LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM, 1835-1912

*189. Mid-Century Confusion of Areas and Jurisdictions.*--Throughout the
earlier and middle portions of the Victorian period legislation
respecting local government was abundant, but it was special rather
than general. It pertained principally to the care of highways and
burial grounds, the laying out and organization of districts for the
promotion of sanitation, the establishment of "improvement act"
districts, and, notably, the erection and administration of school
districts under the Elementary Education Act of 1870. With each
successive measure the confusion of jurisdictions and agencies was
increased. The prevailing policy was to provide for each fresh need as
it arose a special machinery designed to meet that particular need,
and arrangements effected were seldom or never uniform throughout the
country, nor did they bear any logical relation to arrangements
already existing for other purposes. By 1871 the country, as Lowell
puts it, was divided into counties, unions, and parishes, and spotted
over with boroughs and with highway, burial, sanitary, improvement
act, school, and other districts, and of these areas none save the
parishes and unions bore any necessary relation to any of the
rest.[256] In the effort to adapt the framework of the administrative
system to the fast changing conditions of a rapidly growing population
Parliament piled act upon act, the result being a sheer jungle of
interlacing jurisdictions alike baffling to the student and subversive
of orderly and economical administration. It is computed that in 1883
there were in England and Wales no fewer than 27,069 independent local
authorities,[257] and that the rate-payer was taxed by eighteen
different kinds of rates.

[Footnote 256: Government of England, II., 135.]

[Footnote 257: These included the 52 counties, the
239 municipal boroughs, the 70 improvement act
districts, the 1,006 urban sanitary districts, the
57