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.

    37/50 page 31
    At Liverpool, and in London parishes, and other places, such cases as these are put, as justificatoiy of the policy of shifting the burthen. Here is a person who occupies only an office in the city, and does a great deal of business there, and accumulates personal property there during the day, and then goes to his suburban residence, and lives and sleeps there, in a comparatively less burthened district, and thus escapes what is asserted to be his due share of the town burthens and civic duties. The case of the personal pi’operty owner, in answer to the demand for contribution in aid of the real property owner, may be thus stated :— In the first place it may be averred that, by reason of the business done at the City counting-house, an additional value is given directly to real property in largely augmenting rents there, and indirectly to the real property throughout the district, by the demand created for houses for the wage as well as the salaried classes. What would be the value of real property throughout the district if commerce and trade were removed ? The right of any contribution in mitigation of the conse- quences of maladministration may be peremptorily challenged by the personal property owner. And if by a good adminis- tration the rates be brought to a payable condition, the claim of the real property owner, to have the value of his property augmented at the expense of the personal property owner, must be rejected. In the present conditions, further extra- neous contributions only maintain or aggravate the evil. The policy of shifting burthens, and the policy of subventions, will be found to be a policy for the sustentation of mal- administration. At present we have in substance a return to the local condi- tions displayed under tbe Poor Law Commission of Enquiry ; when the I'ates became oppressively heavy and pinching from ignorant, or sinister maladministration, the common effort was to shift the burthen. All the pauperised districts pre- sented scenes of shifting by driving paupers from one parish
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