It appears from some statistics published in the Times that
the total indebtedness of the local authorities throughout England is now £77,073,000, of which the boroughs owe £30,441,000, the Harbour Trustees £19,733,000, the Metropolitan Board 112,766,000, the Urban Sanitary Commission £5,029,000, the 'counties £2,965,090, the Poor-Law Guardians £3,549,000, and the Burial Boards and Drainage authorities the remainder. This debt is equal to eight months' rateable value of the property pledged as security, and shows a tendency to increase every year. Money appears to be obtainable by local authorities from private sources with great ease at from 3i to per cent., and although only two local bodies—the trustees of Warkworth and Bridport harbours —have failed to pay interest, still nothing appears to have happened to those two. It is, we confess, this easy borrowing- power we dread, when proposals are made for more popular municipal authorities, more especially as the work of sanitation and rehousing the poor can scarcely be said to have begun. A medium borough, governed by philanthropists—say, for instance, Carlisle—might strangle itself with debts in less than ten years, and make all property valueless.
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