Municipal lessons from southern Germany / by Henry S. Lunn.

  • Lunn, Henry Simpson, Sir, 1859-1939.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Municipal lessons from southern Germany / by Henry S. Lunn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that full information about them cannot be dug out of treatises and Blue books and consular reports. The Committee does not aspire to discover, but only to display to interested inquirers foreign plans of local government which have stood the test of trial and experience. But Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelitas. The alderman who has neither inclination nor leisure to wade through a Report, will survey with pleasure a hospital, a school, or a slaughter-house, will ask eager questions and fill his mind with useful information gathered at first hand. When he goes back to his city, he tells his brother aldermen and coun- cillors what he has seen with his own eyes, and he is ready to consider any plan by which similar advantages can be obtained for the people of his own country. He will have learnt abroad that local self-government means a great deal more than in common parlance is attached to that term in our own country. It is more than the mere administration, by a popularly elected body, of powers strictly limited and defined by Act of Parliament while they are jealously watched over with a grandmother’s solicitude by a bureau in Dublin, or Edinburgh, or London, which is bound by the rigid uniformity of a red-tape system, and knows little and cares less for the special needs of the locality. It is quite true that in Prussia, for example, local administration is no more neglected and uncared for by the Central Government than in Great Britain. But the intervention is directed to secure the appointment of capable municipal officers, and to the prevention of jobbery. The Local Authority is credited with a better knowledge than the central one of the wishes and needs of the people, and has an extensive discretion for initiating and carrying out measures for the common good which they desire.