On the jurisprudence of chargeability for sanitary works and for poor rates, police rates, and other branches of local administration.

  • Edwin Chadwick
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the jurisprudence of chargeability for sanitary works and for poor rates, police rates, and other branches of local administration. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    liouges and lands, before the burthen of the augmentation was imposed by remiss or maladministration. To whom is this default attributable but to the owners of real property in Parliament, who sanctioned the dereliction of administrative principle, in the first place, in the central organi- zation, in superseding the rule of special aptitudes and undivided attention, by positive inaptitudes and distracted attention? In the minds of those who are conversant with the subject, there would be no doubt whatsoever that the like course with the Irish poor-law administration would be attended with the like consequences; the conversion of a paying tax into a largely non-paying burthen on real property,—of a benefit into an incalculable amount of mischief, even greater than that which the ie:noraTice of economic and of administrative science has perpetrated in Scotland. Real property being now thus burthened with a non-paying excess of expenditure in England, those of the so-called landed interest are grievously mistaken in their course who seek to relieve it, by shifting—by bringing other property in aid— and who talk of justice in doing so—by subventions from the imperial funds. The examination of the practices of shifting from land to manufactures and trading, under the old law, and the shiftings of burthens from class to class and from place to place, by false valuations under the new law—as also the operation of the later subventions, will show how little good is to be obtained by the eventual operation of such measures. On the other hand, if estate agents were to visit urban and rural districts which have by accidental circumstances been preserved as standards of administration, and examine the state of real property there, they would agree that the special interest in question will be the best consulted by a return to correct administration. But this course nowhere appears to enter into the perception of any one on the political platforms—that the real buithen, and the only one—the non-paying portion of the taxation may be reduced or got rid of, by improvement in the local adminis- tration.
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