temperament of this Black Country community-its intellectual character, its ideal of a City? Is there any fundamental principle underlying its multiform aspirations and endeavour? In the conflict of opinions even about questions seemingly incongruous (questions about corporation stock, questions about popular culture; local questions and questions imperial) can there be discovered any line of intellectual cleavage? Avoiding abstract discussions, I wish to isolate, as it were, a fragment of the restless, many-sided life of this swiftly-changing close of the nineteenth century-a fragment of half a million souls-and to examine that.

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Grote, the historian of Greece, was of opinion that the enfranchisement of the English municipalities was about as important and far-reaching a measure as the great Reform Bill itself. He thought that a mayor might become somebody. But there are distinguished politicians even who would appear to think rather meanly of mayors. 'A mayor!' was the exclamation which, in the late debate, a celebrated Irish orator-Mr. Sexton-hissed out, half articulately, between his teeth as he darted his arm daggerwise in the direction of the corner seat, where sat, quietly smiling, the rebel' member for Birmingham. Now the ex-mayor might have retorted (I mean mentally) that, if he thought the Eighty-five would govern Ireland as well as the mayor and his parliament of sixty-four members governed Birmingham, he would at once vote for Mr. Gladstone's Bill. But perhaps it was only in the heat of the moment that Mr. Sexton hurled forth a taunt which seemed to imply that a mayor, even of the head-quarters of British Radicalism, must be, comparatively speaking, a poor creature, and his municipal politics of little more than parochial scope and interest.

Judged by their respective utterances, the Primate is the sounder statesman of the two. He clearly recognises the fact that the delegation of great powers and responsibilities—amounting, indeed, to a very liberal kind and degree of home rule '-from the State to local authorities is one of the most distinctive movements of the day. The government of a town like Birmingham is, in reality, as complex, and demands as high administrative gifts, as if it were a little kingdom. From main drains to free libraries, from coal gas to the antique, whatever concerns the physical and mental well-being of her children, that is the business, the official business, of this renowned city of the Caucus. Lord Granville's Italian cities had foreign policies of their own; and their energies were rather often expended in fighting their foreign rivals next door. In this respect, the English cities are at a disadvantage; but, making allowance for this difference, the scope of self-government of the ideal English City (such as the democratic age is bringing forth) will as far exceed that of the Italian communities, as the nineteenth-century conceptions of public duty are wider than those of the Middle Age. The distinguished

statesman-or, if Mr. Sexton prefers, the distinguished mayor-had this in his mind when he said that Birmingham wanted to keep her best men to herself-her best students, her best writers, her best surgeons and physicians, her best artists. Why should they be so very ambitious to go to London? Why should they not turn Birmingham into a London of the Midlands-a small London certainly, but unlike the mechanical conglomerate of great London-an organism with a life of its own, and a life to be proud of?

But it was not without a long and stout fight that the modern idea of the English city obtained final, definite recognition in Birmingham. Stated generally, the whole course of municipal conflict in Birmingham, from 1835 until the present day, has turned on this idea -the Tories battling obstinately against it; the Liberals, or Radicals, as they were ordinarily called, the Democrats, as Mr. Chamberlain now calls them, fighting as obstinately for it. The contending theories of the scope of corporate government might be described as parochialism and civism (to borrow a word from Dr. Benson's Institute speech). The parochialists were of a mind with the local historian, Hutton; who, about forty years before the Municipal Acts, taunted his townsmen on their rising ambition for the pomps of a mayor, a white wand and a few fiddles.' "The Birmingham folk,' wrote he, have generally something on the anvil besides iron.' 'A town without a charter is a town without a shackle,' he rapped out. Short sentences of this wrought-iron sort, as if chipped off by the deft blows of a Black Country hammerman, are scattered throughout his book. The reason of Hutton's hostility to the civic idea must be explained. Birmingham had always been a free town' -without any shackles' of trading guilds, or merchant guilds, or State-made guilds of any sort. In this 'unshackled' condition, Birmingham had won her great prosperity; and in it he wished her to remain. Besides, the chartered corporations of the day were anything but models of self-government.

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When at last the era of municipal reform arrived, the Tories were still holding to the venerable doctrine that a local government fulfils its end when it keeps a jail and a squad of policemen. They resisted the extension of local liberties, on the ground that popular assemblages-as at ward elections-must be detrimental to the peace and security of the town. They were repeatedly urgingthough the connection was not very apparent-that the charter for which the Liberals fought would injure trade. In fact, the municipal conflict was the national conflict in miniature, as if viewed through an inverted telescope; and the fundamental question common to them both was an ethical question: the question of trust or mistrust in the people; the question which underlies all the speeches in which Birmingham's most distinguished citizen, Mr. Chamberlain, has elaborated (but not very exhaustively) his programme of 'State

Socialism—in a word, a question or theory of human nature. The special issues in dispute-State franchise, municipal franchise, control of police, the limit of local taxation-might be infinitely various and with no apparent connection; but the permanent, the fundamental issue, as above stated, was one and the same. Thus, as already said, there was a law of political cleavage, according to which it would be found that the men who would vote, say, for such prosaic measures as a city's purchase of gas and water monopoly, were the same men who would fight most earnestly for the removal of electoral restrictions, whether in State or city; and for the utmost expenditure of local funds on such a non-political object as popular culture. Such were the men who, in the years when Birmingham was just making her first advance towards the great eminence which she has since reached, took the high ground that no question was too great for the consideration of the municipality-that is, of the people, not merely in their individual, mechanical aggregate of Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons, but in their character of civic organism—that, in a word, the true English city should be a sort of 'miniature republic;' influencing, either by direct impulse or merely by removing unfair obstacles against individual development, the whole sphere of social life; yet necessarily subordinating its activities to those of the national whole, and beating with the nation's mighty life.

For the details of the struggle between the popular and antipopular parties I must refer the reader to Mr. J. Thackray Bunce's municipal history, where it will be seen, how the Tories endeavoured to nullify the charter by preventing the newly born corporation from maintaining and controlling its own police; how Lord Melbourne became alarmed lest those Birmingham fellows,' as he called them, should, in their revolutionary career, reverse the Saturnian feat by swallowing their Whig parent; how all the Whig ministers of the day, including the Greys and the Russells, shared the apprehensions of the Tory Peels and the Tory Wellingtons; how consequently Whig and Tory combined to foist upon Birmingham the foreign police,' the foreign gendarmerie '-in other words, the police controlled from London-how irate Birmingham Radicals, of the type of Mr. Scholefield, M.P., declared they would sooner emigrate from Birmingham, bag and baggage, than live in a town pronounced unfit to take care of itself; how those Birmingham fellows' abused the 'foreign police' and the London Department almost in the same language in which the Irish orators of to-day denounce the Castle' and the Royal Irish Constabulary; how, after four years' fighting, the Radicals carried their point; but how even then the Town Council continued to rank as one among seven or eight co-ordinate Boards independently levying rates for their respective departments, and crossing and recrossing each other's purposes to such striking effect that one authority' might be seen diligently cleansing while a

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second as diligently was shooting rubbish into that very slimy and oozy Rea which did duty as the Arno of the Black Country Florence; and lastly how, in 1851, the Town Council, swallowing up all the Boards, started on its career as a great corporation. I will only say of this period that the Whigs—the more 'cautious,' as they themselves explain, the more timid,' as others insinuate, wing of the great Liberal army-really had some reason for dreading an opening of the democratic flood-gates by the Birmingham fellows.' For, in the first place, Birmingham was the cradle of the political unions which hastened the great Reform Bill; upon which Conservative politicians fathered Chartism and all its works; and of which, it may be added, for the sake of historical connection, our Liberal federations and caucuses are the latest developments. In the second place, local politics and national politics were interfused in Birmingham to an extent and in a degree unknown before or since in any other English city.

This, then, was the first stage in the development of the civic idea. Its work, as also that of the next or transitional stage, which lasted until about 1872, lay mainly in the material sphere. But also in this first period there manifested themselves the early signs of what the future historians of the nineteenth century will recognise as the beginning of the period of popular culture in England. Manchester and Liverpool were already in this respect some years ahead of Birmingham, whose famous free library and first art gallery were not opened to the public until 1865, the latter institution, it may be remarked, being first opened on Sundays in 1872, to the great delight of the vast majority of the working population. The free library, to quote an eloquent speech at the opening ceremonial, is 'the first fruit of a clear understanding that a great town exists to discharge the same duties to the people of that town, which a nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation.' The speech was a note' of a new time. Students of contemporary history will mark how the period from about 1872 has been distinguished by an awakening of popular taste, revealing itself in the establishment of free libraries, picture galleries, museums, loan exhibitions, in almost every corner of the country. This same period, moreover, is distinguished by a rapid growth of political associations. People fail to realise the significance of this popular or democratic renaissance, for the simple reason that they are living in the very midst of it. In the Midland city, this revival set in with full force in the third or present period of its civic development, the Chamberlain period-the period of bold experiments in self-government, of new conceptions of social duty, of new ideas on the relation of the city to the higher life of its people.

The ordinary municipal powers (which Birmingham shares in common with other great towns) have been used by her with such

splendid energy that in the few years of this third period thousands of fever-haunted human piggeries, misnamed houses, have been swept away, 1,500,000l. worth of land acquired in the heart of the town, and a series of magnificent streets and noble public buildings .raised upon it, which have changed Birmingham from one of the ugliest to one of the finest cities in the kingdom. The purchase of the gas and water works for 4,000,000l. was an experiment of unparalleled magnitude in the history of English municipalities. This transaction looked like any other commercial transaction, but it involved a social principle worth noting. It dealt the first great blow at the hoary abuse of 'consolation' prices, proceeding on the just principle that market price is the price of private property required for the good of all a principle which Mr. Chamberlain has so earnestly enforced in his political addresses, and of which more will be heard when the Irish question is swept off the boards. Secondly, as regards the financial results of the purchase, the price of water has been reduced 30 per cent.; the reduction in the price of gas has also been very large-two hints for the future municipality of London. But in this case the meaning of 'profits' has undergone a change. 'Profits' go to the reduction of local taxation, or to the further lowering of prices, for the whole community of Birmingham is the owner. That a necessary of life should never be the monopoly of private speculators, whose first care is (naturally) for dividends, is the doctrine which Mr. Chamberlain enforced in 1874, the year of his second term of office. We shall get our profits indirectly,' said he, 'in the comfort of the town and the health of its inhabitants.'

But the distinctive feature-the most honourable and the most attractive feature-of this present period is the latest step in the comprehension of popular culture within the scope of municipal energy and ambition. This is the 'new departure' in the history of English cities. English municipalities have expended public money on free libraries and picture galleries; but the beautiful building nearly opposite the Birmingham new Art Gallery is the first municipal school of art in the British Isles. The new school and its branches now give instruction to 2,000 pupils. That the city cares as much for the culture of her people as for the sweeping of her streets is the boast of every Birmingham man, from the chief magistrate to the humblest master craftsman bending over his 'factored' work in his own garret. And lastly, in order that the community might have the freest possible scope for its energies, there came into force in 1884 the Consolidation Act, one of the chief effects of which was the removal of the limit of the public rate for libraries, museums, galleries, and the Art School; and, in a word, the extension of borrowing powers indefinitely.

And so we have travelled a long way beyond the jail-and-squadof-constables stage in the evolution of an English City. It would