purposes, and from time to time advises the various local authorities who may seek its advice and assistance for the information of their local inspectors. It also administers the Coinage Act, and provides and issues standards to the Mint and Assay Office for determining the purity and weight of the gold and silver coin of the realm. Under the Sale of Gas Acts, this department provides and maintains standards by which gas is measured for gaslighting purposes; and under the Petroleum Act of 1879 it has to discharge the duty of testing the apparatus for ascertaining the temperature at which petroleum gives off an inflammable gas.

The

(5.) The Financial Department of the Board of Trade was first established as a branch of the Marine Department in 1851; it subsequently became a separate department, and it now deals not only with the general accounts of the Board of Trade and its subordinates, but with those of a variety of funds established at various times for the benefit of seamen and their families. business of the Financial Department is administrative, and not simply that known as accounting. It has to control receipts and expenditure in the different branches of business above referred to, as well as to keep its accounts. In addition to the above it is entrusted with the delicate and responsible duty of receiving, examining, and presenting to Parliament the accounts of Life Assurance Companies.1

The provisions for ensuring the responsibility of the

For the foregoing account of the internal administrative arrangements of this office, the writer is indebted to a valuable memorandum prepared by Mr. Roscoe and revised by Mr. T. H. Farrer, the present Permanent Secretary to the Board.

Board of Trade to Parliament have been somewhat curiously varied in the course of its history. The President of the Board is necessarily, of course, a member of one or other branch of the Legislature, but down till a recent period he was by no means invariably, or even perhaps usually, a member of the Cabinet.

In accordance, however, with the recommendation of a Committee on Foreign Trade in 1864 that he should have a place therein in order to secure due consideration for his advice and opinions on commercial matters, this office has ever since been held by a Cabinet Minister.

There was originally also a Vice-President of the Board of Trade, who was a Privy Councillor and a member of the administration, though without a seat in the Cabinet; but the arrangement not having been found to work well in practice, this office was abolished in 1867, and the managing staff now consists (under the president) of two secretaries, one of them with a seat in Parliament, and the four assistant secretaries above referred to. In cases where the President was a peer the parliamentary secretary would of course be selected from, or provided with, a seat in the House of Commons.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD.

THE department which bears this title may lack the political dignity and historic traditions attaching to other offices of the administration; but it might be said with a certain truth that it yields to none or very few of them in real importance to the community. Certain it is, at any rate, that there is no department upon the efficient discharge of whose functions so many material interests -the comfort, the well-being, and even the lives of so large a number of individuals-depend. In its present shape and under its present title the Local Government Board is an office of extremely recent institution; it is little more than ten years, indeed, since it came into existence; one large branch of its very extensive powers -the supervision of the vast national system of poor relief-having been up to that time vested in the now extinct Poor Law Board. In order, therefore, to comprehend the general nature of this portion of its duties it will be necessary to take a brief survey of the constitution and powers of the body which it has replaced.

The Poor Law Board was created in 1834 by the great Statute (4 and 5 William IV. c. 76), establishing the new Poor Law system, and was in the first instance

hardly a branch of the Central Executive at all. The Commissioners constituting it had none of them a seat in Parliament, at least in their official capacity; and their proceedings were only brought indirectly under the review of the Legislature through the medium of the Home Secretary, to whom they periodically reported. The Commission was at first appointed only for a limited period. This period, however, was extended by several Acts, and in 1847, the date last fixed for its expiration, it was found necessary, in view of the increasing importance of the work, the complexity of its details, and the inconvenience of the imperfect representation of the Board in Parliament, to reconstitute it, and place it under the presidency of a responsible minister eligible to a seat in the House of Commons. This change was effected by the 10 and 11 Vict. c. 109, which enacted that the Board should consist of a President to be appointed by the Queen, and of four Cabinet Ministers, who were to be members ex officio, the Lord President of the Council, the Lord Privy Seal, the Home Secretary, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Such were the powers possessed and exercised by the Poor Law Board down to the date of its abolition in 1871, when they were transferred by the 34 and 35 Vict. c. 70, to the newly-created body in whom they are at this moment vested-to wit, the Local Government Board. But the changes effected by the statute in question were far more extensive than this, and the functions committed to the new department were far more varied and onerous than those which the old Poor Law Board had been wont to discharge. The Local Government Board is something more than the successor of a single extinct

organisation; it is the transferee of certain of the functions of two other administrative bodies. It consolidates as well as replaces, and besides taking over all the manifold duties connected with poor relief, it has gathered into its hands the whole mass of complicated powers formerly vested in a variety of independent authorities for the preservation of the public health.

The statute by which the Local Government Board was constituted recites in its preamble that it is "expedient to concentrate in one department the supervision of the laws relating to the public health, the relief of the poor, and local government;" and proceeds to enact that "from and after the establishment of the Local Government Board, the Poor Law Board shall cease to exist, and all powers and duties vested in or imposed on the Poor Law Board by the several Acts of Parliament relating to the relief of the poor, or vested in or imposed on one of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State "by certain Acts (enumerated in one of its schedules), or vested in or imposed on Her Majesty's Privy Council by certain other Acts (enumerated in another schedule), be transferred to and imposed upon the Local Government Board." The department, the Act continues, "shall consist of a President to be appointed by Her Majesty, and to hold office during her pleasure; and of the following ex officio members, that is to say, the Lord President of the Council, all the Principal Secretaries of State, the Lord Privy Seal, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer." The schedules referred to enumerate seventeen Acts conferring powers and imposing duties upon the Home Office, and seven Acts similarly empowering and instructing the Privy Council; all