" This is
the opening sentence, and it is followed by a page of explanation of the
oppression of the workers by the private appropriation of rent and
interest, and an outline of the proposed reforms, graduated and
differentiated income tax, increased death duties, extension of the
Factory Acts, reform of the Poor Law, payment of all public
representatives, adult suffrage, and several others.
Then the tract settles down to business. London with its County Council
only a few months old was at length waking to self-consciousness: Mr.
Charles Booth's "Life and Labour in East London"--subsequently issued as
the first part of his monumental work--had just been published; it was
the subject of a Fabian lecture by Sidney Webb on May 17th; and interest
in the political, economic, and social institutions of the city was
general. The statistical facts were at that time practically unknown.
They had to be dug out, one by one, from obscure and often unpublished
sources, and the work thus done by the Fabian Society led up in later
years to the admirable and far more voluminous statistical publications
of the London County Council.
The tract deals with area and population; with rating, land values, and
housing, with water, trams, and docks, all at that time in the hands of
private companies, with gas, markets, City Companies, libraries,
public-houses, cemeteries; and with the local government of London, Poor
Law Guardians and the poor, the School Board and the schools, the
Vestries, District Boards, the County Council, and the City Corporation.
Pages:
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