Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎469v] (63/238)

276 The Progress of the Municipal Idea in India.
reflecting the disposition of the Deputy Commissioner,
whose appointment as President has been necessitated in
almost every case by the prevalence of party feeling and
sectarian strife. The absence of a wholesome public spirit
in the rural community lies at the root of this failure,
and until this want is supplied local self-government in
rural tracts of the Panjab will be more or less of a farce.
Does this opinion not amply bear out what it has been
attempted to show above by the municipal statistics of the
Madras and Bombay Presidencies ? But as it is by no
means our purpose to throw cold water on the subject, or
discourage the idea of local self-government in municipal
matters, let us see what can be done towards encouraging
the formation of the local public opinion, which we are at
one with Sir Macworth Young in considering necessary, not
only for the advancement of the country, but also as a
measure of relief to the present centralized system, which
has really more to bear than it can properly carry on its
own shoulders. It is evident that the time has not arrived
when we can trust to the public spirit of even the most
advanced among the rural population to come forward of
their own accord and take part in the management of their
own local affairs out of a sense of public duty, and that
some inducement must be held out to prompt them to do so.
Most of the municipalities hitherto established are in large
towns or populous villages, and the facts noted above prove
how difficult it is to keep even these up to the mark, so that
it is useless to hope for the spread of municipal ideas among
the strictly rural communities without further steps being
taken by authority. We would therefore propose that in
the first place larger municipal centres should be created by
the combination of conveniently-situated villages into muni
cipal groups, in order to render the work of more impor
tance, as well as to procure larger funds out of which to pay
the necessary establishments. In single villages, such as
the first municipalities established by Sir Bartle Frere in
Sattara, and which, by-the-by, have all disappeared, enough