The Express.
London, England, 1864-11-23 00:00:00

.Atiernoou, 9h. Um.
.AUerhoun, 106. 3..Nn.

Till DAT —Morning. 911. 11:07
1,041,11.1101 f Morning, Nis. 7m..

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23.

No one who has seen the changes which are
now being wrought in the smaller towns of Lan-
cashire can doubt that the Public Works Act,
whether or not it has realized the expectations of
its authors in giving work to factory hands, has
brought substantial benefit to the district over
which its operation extends. We may dismiss in
very few words its relation to Manchester, and
one or two other towns of large populations and
fully developed municipal institutions. They have
borrowed large sums of money from the Govern-
ment on the security of the rates, at a lover per-
centage and on more favourable terms than they
could have obtained the same amount from other
capitalists. But borrowing money to bo em-
ployed in remunerative public works is no new
thing to them. They have done it before,
and would have done it again. The
Public Works Act has created, so far
as they are concerned, an exceptionally
favourable state of the money market, and so has
induced them to choose precisely this moment for
improvements which might otherwise have been
spread over a long series of years. But in a host
of other smaller places it has for the first time
made improvement possible.
_ _

Everybody knows with what rapid ugliness a
Lancashire village grows up by the side of some
stream which promises a steady supply of water
for manufacturing purposes, and in how few years
the village grows into a town. First rises the
mill; then, when all the old stone cottages on the
hill sides are full to repletion, and men and
women have to walk miles to their work, long
monstrous rows of brick dwellings stretch them-
selves over the uneven ground. Compared with
the huts in which many agricultural labourers hide
their squalid wretchedness, they are healthy and
roomy ; they have more commonly four rooms
than two, and unless the families who inhabit
them are very large, there is a chance of decency
by night and by day. But there is no attempt
to lay out the place in accordance with
the opportunities of the site ; every freeholder
sells his plot of land, every builder conducts his
speculation as he pleases ; all agree to forget the
sewer ; and instead of paving, a layer of ashes
from the engine fire sorvea to hide the clay. At
first the ill consequences of all this are little felt ; for
through every house flows a perpetual current of fresh
air, and the strong breeze from the moors carries
off the miasma; cinders make a goodroad when there
is not much traffic ; and men are too busy in build-
ing new rows of houses to look to the comfort and
cleanliness of the old ones. But presently another
and another factory is reared ; the village grows
apace ; the airy streets become close and foul ; the
unpaved roads are ankle deep in mire ; while if in
the centre of the place some attention is per-
force
paid to paving, and men who live in
decent houses keep their own doorways clean, the
process of rude growth which we have described
perpetually goes on at every point of the circum-
ference. To introduce into such a place as this
any form of local government is always a difficulty :
innumerable petty personal interests start up in
eager rebellion : every landowner claims to do as
be pleases on his own property ; while the inha-
bitants, swayed by no stronger motive than an
" ignorant impatience of taxation," are more ter-
rEed by the prospect of a rate of twopence in the
pound than allured by the vision of the most
needful or splendid public improvement. Aud
even when some form of municipal government is
at last forced upon them, the candidates who carry
the elections in all the wards are the men who will
spend least of the public money on new-fangled';
schemes, and are happily content to let well alone.
Bo touch is this the case that, in many instances,
the best paved, best drained, beat lighted villages
have been those which, belonging to a single pro-
prietor,
have been saved from no-government, or
niggardly self-government, by suffering the sway
of a paternal despotism.
In the history of many such places the passing
of the Public NVorks Act will form an epoch.
Some overgrown and anarchic villages it has com-
pelled to assume the institutions and responsibili-
ties of a town ; to many towns, which in point of
population (and of population alone) would rank
with county capitals of Southern England, it pre-
sented an opportunity almost of reconstruction
which might never recur. Here was money to be
had on easy terms, public opinion pressing for its
employment, and a creditor who would accept the
security of the rates with as little demur as that of
the Corporation of Liverpool or London. So
plans of arterial drainage have been de-
vised in places which before were almost
guiltier' of a sewer; in hundreds of miles
of streets granite pavement is being substituted
for cinder-covered clay ; public parka are being laid
out and planted ; decent cemeteries are replacing
the dime and squalid churchyards ; hills are
being levelled, and hollows tilled up, at once to