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5
either in whole or in part they include some powers more or less
far reaching and in some directions drastic. To the inexperienced
lay-mind they appear to provide a code sufficient for all
reasonable requirements, and it was probably the intention of the
legislature that they should be so.
Unfortunately the reading of the layman has just as little to
do with the matter as the intention of the legislature.
The governing point of the whole code is the interpretation
placed on the provisions of these statutes in the several Courts by
the "legal mind," and I believe I shall not be accused of any
uncomplimentary remark to that great profession when I say as
a matter of actual every day experience that the more keen and
more highly developed the legal mind may be the more fatal it is
in a general way to sound practical improvement from our point
of view.
The measure of the inadequacy of the health laws in practice
is the measure of disappointment felt by the newly elected
Councillor who, wishing to do something more than abate a
dangerous nuisance, finds at probably the first meeting of the
Authority that his power in the first instance is limited by a
Court of summary jurisdiction.
He, like our friend "the man in the street," finds it hard to
realise what is the actual fact that in practice the health authority
can determine no single thing by itself, and cannot go one step
beyond what the law, as interpreted from the strictly legal point
of view, allows.
He learns that considerations of health or decency, or requirements
of the locality, have nothing to do with the matter, and that
the governing factor is not the sanitary authority, but the legal
mind with its forms of procedure and technical points all tending
to emasculate the enactments of the legislature and to lower the
actual standard of work desired.