In the next place, he should be nominated,
not elected. It is ridiculous that a surveyor, or a health officer, or
even a collector of rates, should be appointed by popular suffrage.
The popular choice usually depends on interest with a few local
leaders, who, as they are not supposed to make the appointment, are
not responsible for it; or on an appeal to sympathy, founded on having
twelve children, and having been a rate-payer in the parish for thirty
years. If in cases of this description election by the population is a
farce, appointment by the local representative body is little less
objectionable. Such bodies have a perpetual tendency to become
joint-stock associations for carrying into effect the private jobs
of their various members. Appointments should be made on the
individual responsibility of the Chairman of the body, let him be
called Mayor, Chairman of Quarter Sessions, or by whatever other
title. He occupies in the locality a position analogous to that of the
prime minister in the State, and under a well organised system the
appointment and watching of the local officers would be the most
important part of his duty: he himself being appointed by the
Council from its own number, subject either to annual re-election,
or to removal by a vote of the body.
From the constitution of the local bodies I now pass to the
equally important and more difficult subject of their proper
attributions.
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