Note (Back) — Chapter VIII

189. Mid-Century Confusion of Areas and Jurisdictions.—Throughout the earlier and middle portions of the Victorian period legislation respecting local government was abundant, but it was special rather than general. It pertained principally to the care of highways and burial grounds, the laying out and organization of districts for the promotion of sanitation, the establishment of "improvement act" districts, and, notably, the erection and administration of school districts under the Elementary Education Act of 1870. With each successive measure the confusion of jurisdictions and agencies was increased. The prevailing policy was to provide for each fresh need as it arose a special machinery designed to meet that particular need, and arrangements effected were seldom or never uniform throughout the country, nor did they bear any logical relation to arrangements already existing for other purposes. By 1871 the country, as Lowell puts it, was divided into counties, unions, and parishes, and spotted over with boroughs and with highway, burial, sanitary, improvement act, school, and other districts, and of these areas none save the parishes and unions bore any necessary relation to any of the rest.[256] In the effort to adapt the framework of the administrative system to the fast changing conditions of a rapidly growing population Parliament piled act upon act, the result being a sheer jungle of interlacing jurisdictions alike baffling to the student and subversive of orderly and economical administration. It is computed that in 1883 there were in England and Wales no fewer than 27,069 independent local authorities,[257] and that the rate-payer was taxed by eighteen different kinds of rates.