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5
1912
These institutions are sadly lacking in the boroughs of London, and, as a
result, there is wanting that local and municipal patriotism which is
created and fostered by them, and which alone makes all men proud of their
place of birth or of their adopted home.
But there is perhaps another reason. The London daily press does not
cater for local news. It concentrates all its enterprise on the supply of
information respecting imperial politics, and on the great events that are
passing day by day throughout the world, and, to a very small extent, on the
doings of the London County Council and one or two other central
bodies, and only on them when questions of political interest are involved,
so that the inhabitants of the boroughs look in vain in their
columns for intelligence as to the things that ought to matter which are
taking place in the metropolitan boroughs. It is true that many boroughs
are provided with weekly local papers, and at least one with a daily
paper, which, to their credit, supply full information about local affairs, but,
unfortunately, these are only read by the comparatively few who are interested
in local politics or in the proceedings of their local municipal bodies. Your
busy London business man will tell you that he has no time to waste on more
than one paper a day, and consequently he does not buy the local paper. Such
men can never be true citizens, nor can they vote, if they do vote—and sad to
say the majority do not—with that knowledge of affairs which they ought to
possess, and which the citizens of great provincial boroughs do possess. But
then these boroughs publish papers—daily papers—which not only give them
all the news of the world, and of the kingdom, but also of the towns in which
they are published. Surely every Londoner should subscribe to at least
one local weekly paper, and to a daily paper if such be published. It
is said that politics should not enter into local affairs, and they should
not, but if ever they are justified they are in the case of the metropolitan
boroughs, for they are the one thing which in the main induces people to take
an interest in local matters and to register their votes. Indeed without
them even fewer people than now do so would vote at all. All this may
seem an exaggeration, but after these paragraphs were written a well-known
writer for a London evening paper confessed in it that he knew very little of
the doings of the London County Council, and that so far as the council of
the metropolitan borough in which he dwells was concerned that his cruse
was empty; that he does not know its shape or extent; and that he once
voted for a County Councillor about whom he knew nothing beyond the fact,
as he was told, that he was blameless. Is it any wonder that ordinary
people know so little about the boroughs in which they live when such a man