The Bombay Municipal Reform Question 1871 PDF Download

Excerpt from The Bombay Municipal Reform Question, 1871: A Speech Delivered at a Meeting of the Bench of Justices, Held on Friday 21st June, 1871; And a Paper Read Before a Meeting of the Bombay Branch of the East India Association, Held on the 20th November, 1871 For let us examine these resolutions calmly and carefully, and I venture to say that we shall not have far to go to point out that actual experience has already shown that they are impotent for any real purpose of municipal reform. I think that the criticism of the essential point of Mr. Forbes's proposals contained in the first part of the amendment proposed by Captain Hancock, hits ac curately a very great defect in Mr. Forbes's plan. I agree with Captain Hancock in thinking that to vest the exe cutive authority in a Town Council assisted by a Secre tary, is the resuscitation of a plan already tried and con demned by experience as wrong in principle and inefficient in practice. I must say with all due deference, that Mr. Nowrojee Furdoonjee's indignant disclaimer against in stituting any comparison between the old Board of Con servancy and the proposed Town Council was charac terized more by assertion than by argument. He did not even attempt to show what essential difference there was between the old Board and the present proposed Town Council that could justify the hope that the latter would succeed where the former had failed. Nor was his comparison with the Town Council of Liverpool more conclusive. I have no doubt that Mr. Nowrojee Fur doonjee took very great pains to make himself intimately acquainted with the constitution and working of that beau-ideal of his, of the Town Council of Liverpool, but when he proceeded to predict a promising future for the Town Council of Mr. Forbes's scheme from the proved excellence of the Liverpool Town Council, on the ground that they were similar, the only difference being that the latter was founded upon the elective principle, I also had no 'doubt that Mr. Nowrojee had familiarized himself with another English institution, the practice so well known to English shopkeepers of urging the irresistible argument of only a guinea. On that principle you could easily prove that a dead body was as good as a living body, the only difference being that the latter had what the former had not, a life, a vital principle. If he thought so little of this difference, what he ought to have com pared his Town Council with, were the Town Councils of the English boroughs before the elective principle was universally introduced in them by the Municipal Cor poration Act of 1835, characterized by the Commissioners appointed to enquire into them as. At once inefficient. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.