Note 47 — VII.—RECOGNISED PRINCIPLES OF LEGISLATION AND STATE OF THE EXISTING LAW FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH. (continued 2)

Except in endeavouring to give more emphatic recommendations as to the importance of making all the paid officers really responsible, I should not vary the representation I had then the honour to make in respect to the means of giving efficiency to local administration. “With respect to the allusion of Mr. Earle, as to the cry of centralization, I conceive that it is a cry to which the few who use it can attach no definite ideas, and it has certainly had little influence except with the most ignorant. The phrase has been used abroad against the destruction of the authority of local administrative bodies, and the substitution of an inefficient and irresponsible agency by the general government. But even abroad, all those who call themselves the friends of popular liberty do not declaim against centralization, but against irresponsibility. Here the phrase is used against a measure by which strong local administrative bodies of representatives have been created over the greater part of the country, where nothing deserving the name of systematised local administration has heretofore existed. The central board may be described as an agency necessary for consolidating and preserving the local administration, by communicating to each board the principles deducible from the experience of the whole; and, in cases such as those in which its intervention is now actually sought, acting so as to protect the administration being torn by disputes between members of the same local board; between a part or a minority of the inhabitants and the board, and between one local board and another, and in numerous other cases affording an appeal to a distant and locally disinterested, yet highly responsible authority, which may interpose to prevent the local administrative functions being torn or injured by local dissentions. I feel confident that the more the subject is examined, the more clearly it will be perceived that the great security for the purity and improvement of local administration must depend on a central agency.”