3. Water Supply.— The supply of water is only in a steadily diminishing number of cities, of which the largest are Bristol and Newcastle, a matter for private enterprise. In 1600 boroughs and urban and rural districts this public service is in the hands of the local au thority, usually the municipal corporation, or (as in the metropolitan district), of a council made up of representatives of different local authorities, the aggregate amount of capital invested in these public water enterprises being about £200,000,000 sterling. It is now generally thought to be a defect that there is no system atic distribution, among the great centres of population, of the natural water basins; and no provincial authorities entitled to control them.
4. Heat, Light and Power.— Gas for light ing, heating, and power is produced and sup plied under the authority of separate statutes, in about 700 cities and towns, besides a num ber of smaller installations started without statutory powers. These gas works were, in their origin, mostly private enterprises (though the local governing body of Manchester started its own gas works in 1816), but there has been a steady tendency to municipalization, until more than 200 towns already govern their own gas production, with a capital of £50,000, 000 sterling invested in their enterprises. Dur ing the last quarter of a century on an average five cities a year have municipalized their gas supply; and as these comprised a majority of the smaller consumers, about one-half of the entire number of the users of gas in the United Kingdom are thus co-operatively supplied by themselves as citizens (Annual Returns as to Gas Works, Board of Trade). Electricity, starting only within the past half century, has been even more predominantly a matter of municipal enterprise. Nearly 200 towns have their own municipal electricity supply, in which some f40,000,000 sterling is now Invested. In Manchester the municipal corporation supplies also hydraulic power.
5. Education.— The extensive public service of education — as a function of local govern ment scarcely a generation old — now makes up more than a fifth of the total expenditure of the local authorities. While the national ex ecutive, by contributing more than half of this expenditure on education, exercises great in fluence by means of the conditions which it at taches to its grants, the power of the local authorities to provide what kind and what amount of educational facilities they deem fit over and above the national minimum, is (so far as secular subjects are concerned) now prac tically unlimited. There is no limit to their
current expenditure, or to the amount of rate they may levy. There is no limit of grade or of age. Anything that is education — whether ele mentary, secondary, or university in grade; whether infant or adult; whether literary, scientific, artistic, technological or professional in kind — the local authority may, if it chooses, provide, without requiring any sanction or ap proval, in whatever way it chooses, under what ever regulations it chooses, gratuitously or at any fee. It is legally restrained only (1) by the statutory exclusion (or only conditional admis sion) of religious instruction in the nature of a catechism distinctive of any particular denom ination; (2) by the statutory obligation to pro vide at least the "national of efficient elementary schools for all children between 5 and 14 requiring elementary, instruction; (3) by the need for sanction of any projects for raising funds by loans. In practice, the dis like of the citizens to an undue increase in the rates restrains the local authorities at present to a comparatively limited use of their vast powers. While elementary schools, of one sort or another,— now always compulsorily at tended and, with trivial exceptions, absolutely free of charge — exist in adequate numbers, there is still an insufficient supply of secondary schools, apart from those maintained from ancient endowments, under separate governing bodies ,• and whilst, in most cities, much has been done for technological education of an elementary grade, the provision for university education and the higher technological instruc tion is, compared with the need, now recognized as inadequate. For everything above the ele mentary school, fees are charged.. On the other hand, London has a "scholarship ladder' unequaled in extent and genuine accessibility anywhere in the world. By an unlimited pro vision of free places coupled with maintenance allowances, awarded on a merely qualifying ex amination, the opportunity for secondary and university education is effectively opened even to the poorest child of more than average abil ity. Nearly all other local authorities have less extensive scholarship schemes on similar lines. The result is that the percentage of the popula tion enjoying secondary schooling is greater in London and various other English cities—not withstanding the fee-paying system — than it is in Chicago or even in Boston.