{Footnote: I am indebted to Mr. E. R. Pease for some valuable
corrections.--H. G. W.}
Let me begin this paper upon the question of Scientific Administrative
areas in relation to municipal undertakings by defining the sort of
Socialism I profess. Because, you know, it is quite impossible to
conceal that there are very many different sorts of socialism, and your
society is, and has long been, a remarkably representative collection of
the various types. We have this much in common, however, that we insist
upon and hammer home and never lose sight of the fact that Property is
a purely provisional and law-made thing, and that the law and the
community which has given may also, at its necessity, take away. The
work which the Socialist movement has done is to secure the general
repudiation of any idea of sacredness about property. But upon the
extent to which it is convenient to sanction a certain amount of
property, and the ways in which existing excesses of property are to
be reduced, Socialists differ enormously. There are certain extreme
expressions of Socialism that you will connect with the names of Owen
and Fourier, and with Noyes’s “History of American Socialism,” in which
the abolition of monopoly is carried out with logical completeness to
the abolition of marriage, and in which the idea seems to be to extend
the limits of the Family and of intimate intercourse to include all
humanity. With these Socialisms I have nothing in common. There are a
large number of such questions concerning the constitution of the family
upon which I retain an open and inquiring mind, and to which I find the
answers of the established order, if not always absolutely incorrect, at
any rate glaringly incomplete and totally inadequate; but I do not
find the answers of these Socialistic Communities in any degree more
satisfactory.
There are, however, more limited Socialisms, systems which deal mainly
with economic organizations, which recognize the rights of individuals
to possessions of a personal sort, and which assume without detailed
discussion the formation of family groups within the general community.
There are limited socialisms whose repudiation of property affects
only the common interests of the community, the land it occupies,
the services in which all are interested, the necessary minimum of
education, and the sanitary and economic interaction of one person or
family group upon another; socialisms which, in fact, come into touch
with an intelligent individualism, and which are based on the attempt
to ensure equality of opportunity and freedom for complete individual
development to every citizen. Such socialists look not so much to the
abolition of property as to the abolition of inheritance, and to the
intelligent taxation of property for the services of the community. It
is among such moderate socialists that I would number myself. I would
make no hard and fast rule with regard to any portion of the material
and apparatus used in the service of a community. With regard to any
particular service or concern, I would ask, Is it more convenient, more
likely to lead to economy and efficiency, to let this service rest in
the hands of some single person or group of persons who may offer to do
the service or administer the concern, and whom we will call the owners,
or to place it in the hands of some single person or group of persons,
elected or chosen by lot, whom we will call the official or group of
officials? And if you were to suggest some method of election that would
produce officials that, on the whole, were likely to manage worse than
private owners, and to waste more than the private owner’s probable
profits, I should say then by all means leave the service or concern in
private hands.
You see upon this principle the whole question of the administration
of any affair turns upon the question, Which will give the maximum
efficiency? It is very easy to say, and it stirs the heart and produces
cheering in crowded meetings to say, “Let everything be owned by all and
controlled by all for the good of all,” and for the general purposes of
a meeting it is quite possible to say that and nothing more. But if you
sit down quietly by yourself afterwards and try and imagine things
being “owned by all and controlled by all for the good of all,” you
will presently arrive at the valuable discovery in social and political
science that the phrase means nothing whatever. It is also very
striking, on such rhetorical occasions, to oppose the private owner to
the community or the state or the municipality, and to suppose all the
vices of humanity concentrated in private ownership, and all the virtues
of humanity concentrated in the community, but indeed that clear and
striking contrast will not stand the rough-and-tumble of the workaday
world. A little examination of the matter will make it clear that the
contrast lies between private owners and public officials--you must
have officials, because you can’t settle a railway time-table or make a
bridge by public acclamation--and even there you will find it is not
a simple question of the white against black order. Even in our state
to-day there are few private owners who have absolute freedom to do what
they like with their possessions, and there are few public officials
who have not a certain freedom and a certain sense of proprietorship in
their departments, and in fact, as distinguished from rhetoric, there is
every possible gradation between the one thing and the other. We have
to clear our minds of misleading terms in this affair. A clipped and
regulated private ownership--a private company, for example, with
completely published accounts, taxed dividends, with a public
representative upon its board of directors and parliamentary powers--may
be an infinitely more honest, efficient, and controllable public service
than a badly elected or badly appointed board of governors of officials.
We may--and I for one do--think that a number of public services, an
increasing number of public services, can be best administered as public
concerns. Most of us here to-night are, I believe, pretty advanced
municipalizers. But it does not follow that we believe that any sort
of representative or official body pitched into any sort of area is
necessarily better than any sort of private control. The more we are
disposed to municipalize, the more incumbent it is upon us to search
out, study, and invent, and to work to develop the most efficient
public bodies possible. And my case to-night is, that the existing local
government bodies, your town councils, borough councils, urban district
boards, and so forth, are, for the purposes of municipalization, far
from being the best possible bodies, and that even your county councils
fall short, that by their very nature all these bodies must fall far
short of the highest possible efficiency, and that as time goes on they
must fail even more than they do now to discharge the duties we Fabians
would like to thrust upon them. And the general reason upon which I
would have you condemn these bodies and seek for some newer and ampler
ones before you press the municipalization of public concerns to its
final trial, is this--that their areas of activity are impossibly small.
The areas within which we shape our public activities at present,
derive, I hold, from the needs and conditions of a past order of things.
They have been patched and repaired enormously, but they still preserve
the essential conceptions of a vanished organization. They have been
patched and repaired first to meet this urgent specific necessity and
then that, and never with any comprehensive anticipation of coming
needs, and at last they have become absolutely impossible. They are
like fifteenth-century houses which have been continuously occupied by
a succession of enterprising but short-sighted and close-fisted owners,
and which have now been, with the very slightest use of lath-and-plaster
partitions and geyser hot-water apparatus, converted into modern
residential flats. These local government areas of to-day represent
for the most part what were once distinct, distinctly organized, and
individualized communities, complete minor economic systems, and they
preserve a tradition of what was once administrative convenience and
economy. To-day, I submit, they do not represent communities at all, and
they become more wasteful and more inconvenient with every fresh change
in economic necessity.
This is a double change. Let me first of all say a word in justification
for my first assertion that existing areas do not represent communities,
and then pass to a necessary consequence or so of this fact. I submit
that before the railways, that is to say in the days in which the
current conception of local government areas arose, the villages,
and still more the boroughs, and even the counties, were practically
complete minor economic systems. The wealth of the locality was, roughly
speaking, local; rich people resided in contact with their property,
other people lived in contact with their work, and it was a legitimate
assumption that a radius of a mile or so, or of a few miles,
circumscribed most of the practical interests of all the inhabitants
of a locality. You got rich and poor in visible relationships; you got
landlord and tenant, you got master and workman all together. But now,
through a revolution in the methods of locomotion, and chiefly through
the making of railways, this is no longer true. You can still see
the villages and towns separated by spaces of fields and physically
distinct, but it is no longer the case that all who dwell in these old
limits are essentially local inhabitants and mutually interdependent as
once they would have been. A large proportion of our population to-day,
a large and an increasing proportion, has no localized interests at all
as an eighteenth-century person would have understood locality.
Take for example Guildford, or Folkestone, and you will find that
possibly even more than half the wealth in the place is non-local
wealth--wealth, that is, having no relation to the local production of
wealth--and that a large majority of the more educated, intelligent and
active inhabitants derive their income, spend their energies, and find
their absorbing interests outside the locality. They may rent or own
houses, but they have no reality of participation and little illusion
of participation in any local life. You will find in both towns a
considerable number of hotels, inns, and refreshment places which,
although they are regulated by local magistrates upon a basis of one
license to so many inhabitants, derive only a small fraction of their
profits from the custom of the inhabitants. You find too in Folkestone,
as in most seaside places, a great number of secondary schools, drawing
scarcely a pupil from the neighbourhood. And on the other hand you will
find labour in both towns, coming in by a morning train and going out at
night. And neither of these instances is an extreme type. As you come
in towards London you will find the proportion of what I would call
non-local inhabitants increasing until in Brixton, Hoxton, or West Ham
you will find the really localized people a mere thread in the mass of
the population. Probably you find the thinnest sham of a community
in the London boroughs, where a clerk or a working man will shift his
sticks from one borough to another and move on to a third without ever
discovering what he has done. It is not that all these people do not
belong to a community, but that they belong to a larger community of a
new type which your administrators have failed to discover, and which
your working theory of local government ignores. This is a question I
have already written about with some completeness in a book published
a year or so ago, and called “Anticipations,” and in that book you
will find a more lengthy exposition than I can give here and now of
the nature of this expansion. But the gist of the argument is that the
distribution of population, the method of aggregation in a community,
is determined almost entirely by the available means of locomotion. The
maximum size of any community of regular daily intercourse is determined
by the length of something that I may best suggest to your mind by the
phrase--the average possible suburban journey in an hour. A town,
for example, in which the only method of progression is on foot along
crowded ways, will be denser in population and smaller in area than one
with wide streets and a wheeled traffic, and that again will be denser
and compacter than one with numerous tubes, trams, and light railways.
Every improvement in locomotion forces the suburban ring of houses
outward, and relieves the pressure of the centre. Now, this principle of
expanding communities holds not only in regard to towns, but also on the
agricultural country side. There, also, facilities for the more rapid
collection of produce mean finally the expansion and coalescence of what
were previously economic unities.
Now if, while this expansion of the real communities goes on, you keep
to the old boundary lines, you will find an increasing proportion of
your population straddling those lines. You will find that many people
who once slept and worked and reared their children and worshipped and
bought all in one area, are now, as it were, delocalized; they have
overflowed their containing locality, and they live in one area, they
work in another, and they go to shop in a third. And the only way in
which you can localize them again is to expand your areas to their new
scale.
This is a change in human conditions that has been a very distinctive
event in the history of the past century, and it is still in progress.
But I think there is excellent reason for supposing that for practical
purposes this change, made by the railway and the motor, this
development of local locomotion, will reach a definite limit in the next
hundred years. We are witnessing the completion of a great development
that has altered the average possible suburban journey in an hour from
one of four or five miles to one of thirty miles, and I doubt very much
whether, when every tendency of expansion has been reckoned with, this
average hour journey will ever get much beyond sixty or seventy miles an
hour. A radius of four or five miles marked the maximum size of the old
community. A radius of a hundred miles will certainly mark the maximum
of the new community. And so it is no effectual answer to my general
argument to say that a revision of administrative areas always has been
and always will be a public necessity. To a certain extent that always
has been and always will be true, but on a scale in no way comparable
to the scale on which it is true to-day, because of these particular
inventions. This need in its greatness is a peculiar feature of the
present time, and a peculiar problem of the present time. The municipal
areas that were convenient in the Babylonian, ancient Egyptian, or Roman
empires were no larger and no smaller than those that served the purpose
of seventeenth-century Europe, and I believe it is highly probable--I
think the odds are in favour of the belief--that the most convenient
administrative areas of the year 2000 will be no larger and no smaller
than those for many subsequent centuries. We are, in this respect, in
the full flow of a great and permanent transition. And the social and
political aspect of the change, is this steadily increasing proportion
of people--more especially in our suburban areas--who are, so far as our
old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a
new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to
establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly localized
communities of the past.
Now what are the practical consequences of this large and increasing
non-local element in your old local government areas? First, there is
this. The non-local people do not follow, have neither the time, nor
the freedom, nor the stimulus of sufficient interests to follow, local
politics. They are a sort of Outlanders. Local politics remain therefore
more and more in the hands of the dwindling section of people whose
interests really are circumscribed by the locality. These are usually
the small local tradesmen, the local building trade, sometimes a doctor
and always a solicitor; and the most energetic and active and capable
of these, and the one with the keenest eye to business, is usually
the solicitor. Whatever you put into the hands of a local
authority--education, lighting, communications--you necessarily put into
the hands of a group of this sort. Here and there, of course, there may
be variations; an organized labour vote may send in a representative,
or some gentleman of leisure and philanthropic tastes, like Mr. Bernard
Shaw, may confer distinction upon local deliberations, but that will not
alter the general state of affairs. The state of affairs you must expect
as the general rule, is local control by petty local interests, a state
of affairs that will certainly intensify in the years to come,
unless some revision of areas can be contrived that will overtake the
amplifying interests of the delocalized section of the population.
Let me point out what is probably the result of a dim recognition of
this fact by the non-local population, and that is the extreme jealousy
of rates and municipal trading by the less localized paying classes in
the community. That is a question we Socialists, believing as we do
all of us at least in the abstract theory of municipalization, must
particularly consider. The easy exasperation of the £1000-a-year man
at the rates and his extreme patience under Imperial taxation is
incomprehensible, unless you recognize this fact of his delocalization.
Then at once it becomes clear. He penetrates the pretences of the
system to a certain extent; and he is infuriated by the fact of taxation
without representation, tempered by a mysteriously ineffective voting
paper left at his door. I myself, as one of the delocalized class, will
confess he has my sympathy. And those who believe in the idea of the
ultimate municipalization of most large industries, will continue to
find in this non-localized class, working especially through the medium
of Parliament, a persistent and effective obstruction to all such
projects, unless such a rectification of areas can be contrived as will
overtake the delocalization and the diffusion of interests that has
been and is still going on. I will confess that it seems to me that this
opposition between the localized and the non-localized classes in the
future, or to be more correct, the opposition between the man whose
ideas and life lie in a small area, and the man whose ideas and life lie
in a great area, is likely to give us that dividing line in politics for
which so many people are looking to-day. For this question of areas
has its Imperial as well as its local side. You have already seen the
Liberal party split upon the Transvaal question; you yourselves have--I
am told--experienced some slight parallel tendency to fission, and it
is interesting to note that this was, after all, only another aspect of
this great question of areas, which I would now discuss in relation to
municipal trading. The small communities are fighting for existence and
their dear little ways, the synthetic great communities are fighting to
come into existence, and to absorb the small communities. And curiously
enough at our last meeting you heard Mr. Belloc, with delightful wit
and subtlety, expounding the very antithesis of the conceptions I
am presenting to-night. Mr. Belloc--who has evidently never read his
Malthus--dreams of a beautiful little village community of peasant
proprietors, each sticking like a barnacle to his own little bit of
property, beautifully healthy and simple and illiterate and Roman
Catholic and _local_, local over the ears. I am afraid the stars in
their courses fight against such pink and golden dreams. Every tramway,
every new twopenny tube, every light railway, every improvement in your
omnibus services, in your telephonic services, in your organization of
credit, increases the proportion of your delocalized class, and sucks
the ebbing life from your old communities into the veins of the new.
Well, you may say, no doubt this is right so far as it goes; existing
local government areas do not represent real countries, but still these
local government devices are of service for cutting up and distributing
administrative work. But that is exactly what they are not. They are
worse when you consider them in regard to function, than when you
consider them in regard to representation. Since our conceptions of what
constitutes a local administrative area were developed there has arisen
the problems of water supply and of organized sewage, of railways,
tramways, and communications generally, and of lighting and telephonic
intercourse; there hangs over us, though the average local authority has
no eyes to see it, the necessity of adapting our roads to accommodate an
increasing new traffic of soft-tyred vehicles, and it is not improbable
that heating by wholesale, either by gas or electricity, will presently
be also possible and desirable. For all these things we need wide views,
wide minds and wide areas, and still more do we want wide views for the
business of education that is now also coming into the sphere of local
administration.
It happens that I have had an object-lesson in this matter of local
government; and indeed it is my object-lesson that has led to this paper
to-night. I live upon the boundary line of the Sandgate Urban District
Board, a minute authority with a boundary line that appears to have been
determined originally about 1850 by mapping out the wanderings of
an intoxicated excursionist, and which--the only word is
interdigitates--with the borough of Folkestone, the Urban District of
Cheriton, and the borough of Hythe. Each of these bodies is by way of
being a tramway authority, each is at liberty to secure powers to set up
generating stations and supply electricity, each is a water authority,
and each does its own little drainage, and the possibilities of friction
and litigation are endless. The four places constitute an urban
area greatly in need of organized intercommunication, but the four
authorities have never been able to agree upon a scheme; and now
Folkestone is concerning itself with the project of a little internal
tramway system all of its very own. Sandgate has succumbed to the spell
of the South Eastern Railway Company, and has come into line with
a project that will necessitate a change of cars at the Folkestone
boundary. Folkestone has conceded its electrical supply to a company,
but Sandgate, on this issue, stands out gallantly for municipal trading,
and proposes to lay down a plant and set up a generating station all
by itself to supply a population of sixteen hundred people, mostly
indigent. In the meanwhile, Sandgate refuses its inhabitants the
elementary convenience of the electric light, and when, quite
inadvertently, I connected across the convolutions of the boundary with
the Folkestone supply, my life was darkened by the threat of impossible
litigation. But if Folkestone repudiates municipal enterprise in
the matter of lighting, I gather it does not do so in the matter
of telephones; and there has been talk of a neat little Folkestone
telephonic system competing against the National Telephone Company,
a compact little conversazione of perhaps a hundred people, rate
sustained. And how is the non-local inhabitant to come into these
things? The intelligent non-local inhabitant can only save his two or
three pounds of contribution to this folly or that by putting in twenty
or thirty pounds’ worth of work in local politics. He has no local
connections, no local influence, he hasn’t a chance against the plumber.
When the house I occupy was built, it was a mere interposition of
Providence that the drain did not go southward into a Folkestone
sewer instead of northward into Sandgate. Heaven knows what would have
happened if it had! I and my neighbours are by a special concession
permitted to have water from the Folkestone source. By incessant
vigilance we do, I believe, usually succeed in deducting the Folkestone
water rate from the Sandgate general rate which covers water, but the
wear and tear is enormous. However, these are details, dear to my heart,
but the merest marginal comments to my argument. The essential fact is
the impracticable silliness of these little divisions, the waste of men,
the waste of nervous energy, the waste of administrative energy they
involve. I am convinced that in the case of almost any public service in
the Folkestone district with our present boundaries, the administrative
waste will more than equal the profit of a private company with
parliamentary powers overriding our local authorities; that if it is
simply a choice between these little bodies and a company (of the common
type even), then in lighting, locomotion, and indeed in almost any
general public service, I would say, “give me the company.” With
companies one may hope to deal later; they will not stand in the way
of developing saner areas, but an obstinate little authority clutching
everything in its hands, and led by a clerk naturally interested
in litigation, and who is also something of an expert in political
organization, will be an altogether harder thing to supersede.
This difficulty in greater or lesser degree is everywhere. In the
case of poor law administration in particular, and also in the case of
elementary education, the whole country displays what is another aspect
of this same general phenomenon of delocalization; the withdrawal of all
the wealthier people from the areas that are specializing as industrial
centres, and which have a rising population of poor workers, to areas
that are specializing as residential, and which have, if anything,
a falling proportion of poor labourers. In a place like West Ham
or Tottenham you find starved schools and an abundant delocalized
industrial population, and, by way of contrast, at Guildford or Farnham
for example, you will find enormously rich delocalized people, belonging
to the same great community as these workers, who pay only the most
trivial poor rate and school rate for the benefit of their few immediate
neighbours, and escape altogether from the burthens of West Ham.
By treating these places as separate communities you commit a cruel
injustice on the poor. So far as these things go, to claim convenience
for the existing areas is absurd. And it is becoming more and more
evident that with tramways, with lighting, with electric heating and
force supply, and with the supply of water to great populations, there
is an enormous advantage in large generating stations and large areas;
that these things must be handled in areas of hundreds of square miles
to be efficiently done.
In the case of secondary and higher education one discovers an equal
stress and incompatibility. At present, I must point out, even the
boundaries of the projected educational authority for London are
absurdly narrow. For example, in Folkestone, as in every town upon
the south coast, there are dozens of secondary schools that are purely
London schools, and filled with London boys and girls, and there are
endless great schools like Tonbridge and Charterhouse outside the London
area that are also London schools. If you get, for example, a vigorous
and efficient educational authority for London, and you raise a fine
educational system in the London area, you will find it incomplete in an
almost vital particular. You will give the prosperous middle class and
the upper class of London the alternative of good teaching and bad air,
or of what very probably, under tolerant local authorities, will be
relatively bad teaching and open air and exercise out of London. You
will have to tax this influential class of people for the magnificent
schools they in many cases will be unable to use. As a consequence, you
will find again all the difficulties of their opposition, practically
the same difficulties that arise so naturally in the way of municipal
trading. I would suggest that it would be not only logical but politic,
for the London Educational Authority, and not the local authority, to
control every secondary school wherever it happened to be, which in
an average of years drew more than half its attendance from the London
area. That, however, by the way. The point more material to my argument
here is that the educational organization of the London area, the Thames
valley, and the southern counties are inseparable; that the question of
local locomotion is rapidly becoming impossible upon any smaller basis
than such an area; that roads, light railways, drainage, water, are all
clamouring now to be dealt with on the big scale; and that the more
you cut this great area up, the more you leave it in the hands of the
localized men, the more you sin against efficiency and the light.
I hope that you will consider this first part of my case proved. And
now I pass on to the more debatable question--the nature of the new
divisions that are to replace the old. I would suggest that this is a
matter only to be answered in detail by an exhaustive analysis of the
distribution of population in relation to economic standing, but I may
perhaps just indicate roughly what at a first glance I imagine would be
one suitable local government area. Let me remind you that some years
ago the Conservative party, in an outbreak of intelligence, did in
a sort of transitory way see something of what I have been trying to
express to-night, and created the London County Council--only to quarrel
with it and hate it and fear it ever since. Well, my proposal would
be to make a much greater area even than the London County, and try to
include in it the whole system of what I might call the London-centred
population. I believe If you were to take the whole valley of the Thames
and its tributaries and draw a line along its boundary watershed, and
then include with that Sussex and Surrey, and the east coast counties up
to the Wash, you would overtake and anticipate the delocalizing process
almost completely. You would have what has become, or is becoming very
rapidly, a new urban region, a complete community of the new type, rich
and poor and all sorts and aspects of economic life together. I would
suggest that watersheds make excellent boundaries. Let me remind you
that railways, tramways, drain-pipes, water-pipes, and high-roads
have this in common--they will not climb over a watershed if they can
possibly avoid doing so, and that population and schools and poor tend
always to distribute themselves in accordance with these other things.
You get the minimum of possible overlap--such overlap as the spreading
out of the great midland city to meet London must some day cause--in
this way. I would suggest that for the regulation of sanitation,
education, communications, industrial control, and poor relief, and for
the taxation for these purposes, this area should be one, governed by
one body, elected by local constituencies that would make its activities
independent of imperial politics. I propose that this body should
replace your county councils, boards of guardians, urban and rural
district councils, and all the rest of them altogether; that you should
elect it, perhaps triennially, once for all. For any purpose of a more
local sort, local water-supply systems, local tramway systems--the
tramways between Brighton and Shoreham, for example--this body might
delegate its powers to subordinate committees, consisting, it has
been suggested to me by Mrs. Sidney Webb, of the members for the
local constituencies concerned, together with another member or so to
safeguard the general interests, or perhaps with an appointed expert or
so in addition. These committees would submit their detailed schemes for
the approval of committees appointed by the general body, and they would
be controllable by that body. However, there is no need for detailed
scheming here and now. Let us keep to the main idea.
I submit that such a mammoth municipality as this will be, on the one
hand, an enormously more efficient substitute for your present little
local government bodies, and on the other hand, will be able to take
over a considerable proportion of the detailed work and a considerable
proportion of the detailed machinery, of your overworked and too
extensive central machinery, your local government board, education
department, and board of trade. It will be great enough and fine enough
to revive the dying sentiment of local patriotism, and it will be a body
that will appeal to the ambition of the most energetic and capable men
in the community. They will be picked men, to a much greater extent than
are your guardians, your urban district councillors and town councillors
and so on, at present, because there will be perhaps a hundred or a
couple of hundred of them in the place of many thousands. And I
venture to think that in such a body you may confidently hope to find a
collective intelligence that may be pitted against any trust or board of
directors the world is likely to produce.
I suggest this body as a sort of concrete sample of the thing I have
in mind. I am quite open to hear and accept the most far-reaching
modification of this scheme; it is _the idea of the scale_ that I wish
particularly to enforce. Municipalize on this scale, I would say, and
I am with you altogether. Here is something distinctly and clearly
subserving that making of mankind upon which all sane social and
political proposals must ultimately base themselves. But to put
more power, and still more power in the hands of these petty little
administrative bodies that we have to-day, is, I submit, folly and
darkness. If the existing areas are to remain the same, then, on the
whole, my vote is against municipal trading, and on the whole, with
regard to light, to tramways and communications, to telephones, and
indeed to nearly all such public services, I would prefer to see these
things in the hands of companies, and I would stipulate only for the
maximum publicity for their accounts and the fullest provision for
detailed regulation through the Board of Trade.