English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1906 (repr.1922)
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    particularly Overseers, are vested with a power that cries aloud for abridgment. I shall not be unjust when I say they can pick the pockets of the rich and starve the poor with impunity. Experience warrants this assertion when tradesmen spend, and refuse an account of the expenditure of the money collected by them as Overseers, pretend drunken- ness, madness, loss of books, ignorance of the whole matter; and the committee of parish accounts, under whose directions they act, and who have admitted them to their board, and given them contracts to serve the workhouse, sanction their malconduct by their ignorance what to demand of them. . . . The mischief originates from the character and rank of the person so appointed, and from the connivance of his friends of the same rank and character. Every parish officer, wrote a shrewd London observer in 1796, thinks he has a right to make a round bill on the parish during his year of power. An apothecary physics the poor; a glazier, first in cleaning, breaks the church windows, and afterwards mends them, or at least charges for it; a painter repairs the commandments, puts new coats on Moses and Aaron, gilds the organ-pipes, and dresses the little Cherubim about the loft as fine as vermilion, Prussian blue, and Dutch gold can make them. The late Churchwardens [of the writer's own London parish] were a silversmith and a woollen draper; the silversmith new fashioned the communion plate, and the draper new clothed the pulpit and put fresh curtains to the windows. ^ (d) The Rule of the Boss The important parish of Bethnal Green, which practically adjoins the City of London on the north-east, and quickly became, as Francis Place observes, the residence of an immense number of poor people, presents for half a century a remarkable example of government by what the Americans have since termed a Boss. From the evidence given before various Select Committees of the House of Commons, and other contemporary sources—confirmed by a careful analysis ^ Gentle7rw,n-s Magazine, March 1802, p. 225. Sir John Hawkins in 1763 was deplonng the practice of electing tradesmen and persons, necessarily dependent and subject to influence, into parish offices. ^ 2%e Oho, by Francis Grose, 1796, pp. 217-218.
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