ry in 1888 was supplemented by the provisions
of the District and Parish Councils Act, carried by a Liberal ministry
in 1894.[260] This measure provided (1) that every county should be
divided into districts, urban and rural, and every district into (p. 181)
parishes, and (2) that in every district and in every rural parish
with more than three hundred inhabitants there should be an elected
council, while in the smallest parishes there should be a primary
assembly of all persons whose names appear on the local government and
parliamentary register. To the parish councils and assemblies were
transferred all of the civil functions of the vestries, leaving to
those bodies the control of ecclesiastical matters only, while to the
district councils, whether rural or urban, were committed control of
sanitary affairs and highways.
[Footnote 258: The arrangements effected at this
time were perpetuated in the great Public Health
Act of 1875. Lowell, Government of England II.,
137.]
[Footnote 259: The number of county boroughs had
been increased by 1910 to seventy-four. See p.
188.]
[Footnote 260: It should be observed that the
original intent in 1888 was to deal with district
as well as county organization. In its final form
the bill carried in that year had to do only,
however, with the counties.]
The effect of the acts of 1888 and 1894 was two-fold. In the first
place, they put the administrative affairs of the rural portions of
the country in the hands almost exclusively of popularly elected
bodies. In the second place, their adoption afforded opportunity for
the immediate or gradual abolition of all local governing authorities
except the county, municipal, district, and parish councils, the
boards of guardians, and the school boards, and thus they contributed
vastly to that gradual simplification of the local governing system
which is one of the most satisfactory developments of recent years.
The act of 1894 alone abolished some 8,000 authorities. Since 1894 the
consolidation of authorities and the elimination of areas have been
carried yet further, the most notable step being the abolition of the
school boards by the Education Act of 1902 and the transfer of the
functions of these bodies to
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