V1 
Preface 
task. There are probably not a dozen persons in 
England who could pass an examination on the prin- 
ciples which determine the distribution between the 
various localities of the proceeds of the national taxes 
allocated to them by the Local Government Act, 
1888, and the Acts which have followed it; there are 
probably several thousand practical local administra- 
tors who believe that if the cost of paying and clothing 
the local police force is increased, the locality will 
recover half the cost from the imperial exchequer— 
which has not been true ever since 1888. 
In the first edition 1 scarcely discussed the merits 
of the system of rating, and indeed rather rashly 
expressed the opinion that the mferences to be drawn 
from the history were obvious. As it turned out, 
many readers drew inferences which seem to me 
neither obvious nor correct. In particular, some of 
them appeared to draw the astonishing conclusion 
that a system which grew up, as the phrase is, “of 
itself,” that is, was established by the practice of 
thousands of communities, and their experience 
through several centuries, must necessarily be bad, 
and ought forthwith to be abolished in favour of some 
fanciful modernised * restoration’ of the primitive 
arrangements which it gradually displaced. I have 
therefore, in the seventh chapter, tried to answer the 
question whether the existing system fits in with our 
ideas of justice, and in the eighth chapter I have 
discussed at greater length its advantages from an 
sconomic point of view. I fear that some readers 
will be shocked to find that I can speak as favourably 
as I do of an institutiont which causes so much grumb- 
ling. I would ask them to remember that it is