DEMOCRACY AND LOCAL ELECTIONS
For some time past there has been a growing uneasiness in the minds of many observers with regard to the question of our system of local government. On the one hand there are widespread complaints of municipal mismanagement and extravagance, on the other a constant demand for the conferring of greater powers and responsibilities upon municipal bodies. Often, indeed, the very people who are loudest in their complaints of incompetence are most insistent in demanding further powers for the bodies they denounce. Meanwhile enterprise of all kinds, both civic and philanthropic, is passing more and more out of the hands of individual citizens into those of public bodies "elected by the people." The magnitude of the powers now exercised by these bodies, and the fact that there appears to be no prospective limit to their activity, render it imperative that we should scan closely the operation of the system under which they are appointed and ask ourselves whether it works as it is intended to work, and whether we are securing under it the administrators best fitted for functions which concern the future of the country more closely than any question of foreign policy or imperial extension.
The nature and constitution of municipal bodies and the methods of their appointment were finally settled and prescribed by the Local Government Act of 1894. The main object of that Act was, as
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