Read The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 for Free Online Page A

one with land who had connections -- wanted anyway. Had these men who ran things been able to declare explicitly the assumption on which they lived, they would have said that the world was essentially perfect, fixed, and unchanging.
     
    And their world changed very little in the eighteenth century, at least before the American Revolution. Their assumptions were widely shared in the villages and parishes of England, as well as in London. There was a good deal of energy in English local government, but it arose in isolation and it remained uncoordinated from above. For the most part, the Crown and Parliament ignored government in the municipal boroughs and corporations, in parishes, in the Quarter Sessions of the counties, and in the Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes. Parliament, at least, recognized their existence and over the course of the century passed hundreds of statutes concerning local affairs. But the manner in which this was done reflected the regnant ideas about the proper role of government in the life of the nation.
     
    Parliament had begun early in the seventeenth century to pass "Local Acts," which applied not to the whole kingdom as a Public General Act did, but to a designated locality. These Local Acts created the
     
    Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes -- the Commissioners of Sewers, the Incorporated Guardians of the Poor, the Turnpike Trusts, and the Improvement Commissioners (charged with lighting, watching, paving, cleaning, and improving streets). At the time of the American Revolution, there were over a thousand such bodies; eventually their number would reach eighteen hundred, with responsibilities extending over a larger area and more people than all the Municipal Corporations taken together. These statutory authorities differed from all other types of local governing agencies, parishes, counties, and boroughs, for each of them was created by a special act of Parliament to fulfill one function, prescribed by the establishing statute, in a designated place. Commissioners of Sewers built and maintained in hundreds of localities trenches and drains to carry off storm water; they also constructed drains and other works to reclaim marshes and to keep out the sea. The verdant Midlands of England were in a sense the creation of these bodies, which drained off the water and kept it out, turning marshland into lovely and productive fields and pastures.
    Most of the hundreds of statutory authorities operated independently of other local agencies; the Guardians of the Poor, who handled relief of the indigent, vagrants, idlers, and others commonly despised by eighteenth-century society, were a notable exception. They were usually connected by the laws with parish and sometimes county and borough governments. But they had no ties, neither responsibilities nor claims, to any agency of the ministerial government: their accounts were not audited, they published no accounts or reports, their actions passed uninspected by anybody, and yet they possessed the power to arrest, detain, and punish the poor in their charge.
    This freedom to act irresponsibly came from the form of their creation and from Parliament's indifference. The special authorities got their bearings not as the result of a considered policy of Parliament or the government, but from the initiative of interested local groups. The Local Acts which set them up did not enter the full debates of either house, but usually were discussed only in small meetings by the members of the counties and boroughs to be affected by their passage.
    Thus these special authorities, like the Municipal Corporations and the Quarter Sessions, operated unchecked by the Privy Council or the Assize Judges, and virtually ignored by their parent, the Parliament. In this way the localities were governed -- the poor supervised, the streets improved, the marshes drained, the roads built and maintained, and a variety of other essential services provided, or unprovided