boats. They take room and must be fed, and we hadn't a foot of space or an ounce of grub and water to spare, and we had two hundred miles to go. I begged the captain. 'I'll give Bayard my place,' I said. I knew he was right; but I couldn't help it. 'Let me go back and get him.' I know now it would have been foolish; but I'd have done it all the same. So would you, maybe, if you'd known that dog and seen his trusting eyes lookin' out of his scorched face and remembered what he'd just done.

"The captain never looked at me when he answered. He couldn't; his eyes were too full.

"Your place is where you are, sir,' he said, short and crisp. 'Shove off, men.'

"He will never get over it. That dog stood for the girl he'd lost, somehow. That's the captain's bell. I'm wanted on the bridge. Good-night."

Again the cabin door swung free, letting in a blast of raw ice-house air, the kind that chills you to the bone. The gale had increased. Through the opening I could hear the combers sweeping the bow and the down-swash of the overflow striking the deck below.

With the outside roar came the captain, his tarpaulins glistening with spray, his cap pulled tight down to his ears, his stormbeaten face ruddy with the dash and cut of the wind. He looked like a sea Titan that had just stepped from the crest of a wave.

If he saw me-I was stretched out on the sofa by this time—he gave no sign. Opening his tarpaulins and thrashing the water from his cap, he walked straight to the cage, peered in, and said softly:

"Ah, my little man! Asleep, are you? I just came down to take a look at the chart and see how you were getting on. We're having some weather on the bridge."

L

ONDON is not a city. It is a score of cities. Everybody speaks of it as a city, but nobody really thinks of it as one. Men think only of what London means to them. It means Mayfair, Belgravia, Westminster, the City about the Bank, or Whitechapel. London is a place-a place where the worldwide empire of Great Britain and, in a sense, all mankind converge. It is a place, too, where all the world comes. Men live in closer association here than anywhere else in the world. But still London is not a city. It is not a city in the eyes of the law. It is a county. And its governing body is called a County Council.

I do not pretend to know how this area of one hundred and twenty-one square miles called London is governed. I suppose there are some men who do know, but they must be very few. A man of ordinary intelligence can comprehend the charter of an American city in a few hours' time at most; but to understand the government of London is to understand the history of London and the acts of Parliament for centuries at least. The municipal code of an American city seldom exceeds a few printed pages. The model code proposed by the National Municipal League for adoption by the legislatures of the States contains in all but twentyfive printed pages. The charter of London, however, with all of its political agencies, would fill a large volume, and the laws are all so interrelated and builded upon the past that no one, save an antiquary, ever could know all about them. For London never has had a definitely co-ordinated system of government struck off at one sitting of Parliament. At no time has Parliament been willing to take up the administration of the metropolis in the way the legislature of New York did that of Manhattan Island when it adopted her recent charter. The English mind hates any violent departure from the past. It fears to begin anew. It has an instinctive terror of any big change. If all the laws from the time of the first political

organization of the Dutch in the seventeenth century down to the last act of the Albany Legislature were preserved as the charter of New York, we should have some idea of the governmental machinery of the metropolis of the United Kingdom.

This is why few people really know how London is governed; what are the powers of the various political bodies; just where Parliament and the County Council begin and the boroughs, boards, commissions, and Poor Law agencies end.

A real attempt was made to evolve order out of chaos in 1888, when the London County Council was formed. But Parliament halted before it had gone very far. It took fright at the idea of creating a little democracy in the heart of the empire. And it had been better for Parliament had it left things as they were. For the London County Council has been the terror of the age-long privileges of the landlords and franchise owners of the metropolis ever since it came into existence. Parliament made still further concessions to necessity in 1899, when it swept away a multitude of parishes, and created twenty-seven metropolitan boroughs with councils and mayors like any other city. These little cities within the metropolis administer the public health acts; they have supervision of the highways, assess and collect the local rates, and have power to deal with the housing and other local questions. But it is the County Council that is the most important political agency in the metropolis. Its powers were not very extensive at first. Even now they seem insignificant in comparison with those of our own cities. As a matter of fact, all of the councils, boards, and other local agencies are so cramped, cabined, and confined by Parliament that their combined powers do not equal those of the average American city, limited as it is in its powers.

The Council has control of the main sewage; the protection of the community from fires; the building and maintenance of bridges and ferries; the control of the means of transit on the streets; the street improve

ments; asylums; housing; parks and open spaces. It has considerable power in matters of the public health and the supervision of the metropolitan boroughs in the administration of their functions. It has large control over education, and enjoys many lesser powers. It is the County Council that is making of London a city.

The Council commands the best talent in the kingdom, and it is one of the most democratic bodies in the world. It is, in fact, a city republic, and under the present Liberal ministry it is likely to become one of the greatest agencies of radicalism in the civilized world. The Council came into existence through the inefficiency, if not the corruption, of the old Metropolitan Board of Works, which had been created in 1855 to satisfy the necessity of some central body for all of London. For up to that time the metropolitan area was governed by over three hundred parochial boards composed of about 10,000 members. These boards were ancient church parishes, governed by hundreds of private and special acts which were unknown and inaccessible to anyone save the officials themselves. The methods of election to office varied from one street to another. Even the powers were not the same. The members of these bodies were elected at a town meeting, usually so held that only those persons interested in the election could be present. There was no secret balloting-only a showing of hands. Up to 1855 London was really governed by political inertia. It was much as though Greater New York had no other authority than hundreds of ward or precinct meetings at which only those were present who were candidates for office. We can imagine the result of such a condition. It was not until 1899 that these vestries or parishes were abolished and twenty-seven borough councils were erected in their stead. These now exist alongside of the County Council, and maintain a very vigorous life.

In addition to the County Council and the borough councils, there remains the City of London proper. It is a political anachronism, an historical survival. It is a mediæval city with a royal charter. Parliament has carefully respected its ancient privileges. It is a tremendously rich corporation. It owns lands and plate and other forms of wealth. It has a population of 26,923 by night and hundreds of thousands by day.

It is the most unique municipality in the world. Its Lord Mayor is a petty king; he lives in the Mansion House, just opposite the Bank of England. It has power to remake its own constitution. It is known as "The Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens of the City of London." There are twenty-five aldermen and 206 common councilmen. The latter are elected by the rate-payers of the city.

The corporation spends much money in feasting, in extravagant display, and in charity, but remains the most reactionary influence in all London. It is as though the region about Wall Street were a separate corporation, distinct from Greater New York, and governed by the banks, insurance companies, the brokers, and big business interests of the metropolis. The City of Westminster is also a city within the corporate limits of the County Council. It lies about the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square, and is only less ancient than the City of London proper.

But the chaos of municipal administration does not end with these agencies. The police department is administered by Parliament directly through the Home office. The water-supply of London is in the hands of the London Water Board of sixty-six members, while the docks on the river and the Poor Law schools are administered by the Thames Conservancy Board and the Lea Conservancy Board. In addition to these are the thirty-one Boards of Guardians who have control of the Poor Law administration. There are also the Metropolitan Asylum Board and the four school district boards.

All these agencies are more or less at war. Their functions conflict and overlap so that a united policy such as is possible in Berlin, Paris, or New York, is out of the question. All these agencies combined expend about $75,000,000 a year. This seems a pretty large sum for a city. It is larger than many a national budget. Greater New York expends $108,000,000 each year. But the comparison is of little value, for the cities do very different things.

It is the London County Council that inspires the affection of the Londoner. There are some men who are beginning to love London. Not as Lamb, Johnson, and Goldsmith loved London, not as the world which gathers there loves it, but as the

burghers of the free cities of old Germany, or the people of Florence in the days of her greatness loved their cities. For the London County Council is beginning to care for its people just as the old boards and the vestries cared for the privileged interests. And that is really the test of a city. What does it do for its people? For there is something reciprocal about politics, especially city politics. Here in America we are beginning to see that a city which does little for the citizen gets little from the citizen. The fraternal sense is very much wider than a secret society. It is universal.

Since its creation in 1888 the Council has been engaged in one long fight with privilege, with the privilege of the landlords, of the water, gas, electricity, transportation corporations, with the old school boards, the contractors, and all the reactionary influences that had enjoyed centuries of undisturbed control of London. They were not unlike the big business interests in control of the American city. They looked upon the government as their government, as an agency to watch over and protect their privileges. That government was a thing for the people to use or that it had any business meddling with their abuses was as foreign to their thought as are the demands of the peasants to the traditions of the grand dukes of Russia.

But the County Council thought otherwise. It came up from the people, and it felt their needs and responded to their pulsebeats. It is a big body, is the Council. It contains 118 men. Two councilmen are elected from each parliamentary district, with four from the City of London proper. In addition to this, there are nineteen aldermen, distinguished citizens, elected by the Council itself. The aldermen serve for six years, the members of the Council for three years. There is no lord mayor, not even a titular mayor. The Council elects a chairman, who may be a peer, as was Lord Rosebery, or a business man who has fought his way up to eminence through his service on the Council. All business is transacted through committees, which are the executive heads of the city.

The Council knows no politics—at least its politics bears no national names. But there is plenty of politics in every election, and the party names are those of Moderates and Progressives. The former party is con

servative, and tenacious of the past; the latter is radical and looks to the future. As a matter of fact, the line of division is one that we know in America. It is an economic one. The Moderates are identified with the landlords, the franchise owners, and big business interests. They are Tories, in fact, while the Progressives are Liberals or more often Radicals or Socialists. The Progressives have enjoyed almost uninterrupted control of the Council since its organization. It is they who have made a democracy of London. For this is the ideal toward which its members are working. And men like John Burns, who has been with the Council from its beginning; like Sidney Webb, the leading English Socialist; like Sir Frederic Harrison, are conscious of the terrible cost of modern civilization, and see in the city a means for its correction. And it is about the big social questions that the contests of the Council centre. There has come over the Englishmen of the younger generation an enthusiasm for ideals that is strangely absent in Parliament. And members of the bar, members of the profession of medicine, retired gentlemen, and peers of the realm have entered the hustings along with laboring men and Socialists over questions that are very disturbing to the old school of Englishmen. The last election, in 1904, was a signal victory for the Progressives, the Radicals and the municipal Socialists. Their programme included the clearing away of disease-breeding slums and the erection of fine model dwellings owned by the Council and rented to the occupants at a reasonable charge. This is the Council's housing policy. It included the ownership and operation of the tramways and their extension into a splendid system, as well as a new municipal steamboat service on the Thames. This is its transportation programme. The taxation of land val、 ues is the next step in the Council's policy. The improvement of the port of London, the municipalization of the water-supply, the widening of many thoroughfares, the completion of a main drainage scheme, the opening up of small parks and open spaces, the promotion of temperance and of education, the betterment of the condition of municipal employees, and the development of the Works Department, for the doing of all public work without the intervention of the contractor, are some of the other things the

Council is doing. It is upon these issues that the rate-payers of London divide at an election. And when it is considered that the laws are so adjusted that local taxes are paid by the tenant and in consequence that those who vote are conscious of their burdens, it is a significant evidence of the changing social order that the Radicals have been able to remain in power for so long.

In the beginning the people treated the County Council as an experiment. They timidly read the accounts of its sessions in the obscure little building where the Council met on Spring Garden Street. For London had never thought of itself as a city. It doesn't think so yet. It takes some time for a people to forget its past. And the three hundred parishes with their anarchy of administration are the only memories that London has of municipal administration. And it was very revolutionary to have a big, busy, meddling Council upsetting things and expressing its opinion about Parliament. To add to it all, John Burns had been elected to the Council from Battersea. John Burns, the leader of the dockers' strike, John Burns the Socialist, who had been in jail for inciting to riot, and who had been heralded in the papers as marching on London with sixty thousand hungry men but a few years before! Men wondered what the world was coming to. Was nothing sacred? For England had always looked upon politics as the exclusive business of gentlemen. I met John Burns in those days when the Council was still an experiment. That was in the early nineties. He talked about his dreams-the dream of the London that was to be. I tramped over Battersea with him where he lives. Battersea is a part of London and has long been a working man's parish, for the wage-earners are in control of its Council. Burns talked of his contests, contests with the big interests above and the labor-unions who had elected him and paid him such salary as he received for serving them. His neighbors in Battersea and the Socialists were disappointed; disappointed because he did not electrify Parliament and the Council with his turgid eloquence of their wrongs. But they continued to believe in him, continued to elect him to the Council and to Parliament. And in later years England came to believe in this "intellectual combination of a terrier and a bull-dog," as Burns

has been termed, just as London has come to believe in its Council, and the radical things the Council is doing and has done in the last twenty years. For the dreams which its early members dreamt are being realized. They were democratic dreams in the interest of all the people. They justify belief in our own municipal institutions and give assurance that the city is to be the chief agency in the movement for better conditions of life that seem to be agitating the whole world. For during the last score of years London has found itself. The centuries' long chaos of vestry government is a thing of the past. The County Council found the people of the metropolis badly housed. It has undertaken a comprehensive housing policy. It cleared slum areas and erected model dwellings which now house or will house 100,000 people. It opened up the parks to the widest use and offered to its people recreation spots in the form of small parks. It found the city in the hands of the private contractors. They combined against the community on all work, and gave such service as suited their convenience. It found its employees underpaid and overworked. It elevated their condition by fixing a standard fair wage to be paid. It began to do its own work without the contractor. This policy of fair wage and direct employment has since been extended to almost all the cities in the kingdom. The Council pays the trade-union rate of wages. It has shortened the hours of labor. But it is through the direct employment of labor that the greatest gain has been made. In order to carry out this policy a Works Department was organized. An immense workshop was opened where all sorts of city work is performed. The city now has from 3,000 to 4,000 skilled workmen on its pay-roll. It builds sewers, erects its own model dwellings, fire-engine houses, and police stations. The Council itself bids upon all work, and if its proposal is the lowest, it secures the job as would any other contractor. During six months in 1905 it completed work to the value of nearly $2,000,000. It carried through the clearance scheme by which the magnificent new street improvement known as King's Way was completed. I visited the immense workshop of the department. It lies along the Thames just opposite the Houses of Parliament. It was like any other factory