The greatest strides which applied Socialism has made during the last twenty years have been made in connection with the municipalities. The best proof that can be given of the immense and salutary growth of municipal activity in recent years is to be found in the angry panic which this growth has produced among the financial exploiters of public needs. The latter, having at their back boundless wealth and influence, a powerful and lavishly endowed organisation, a vast army of lecturers and pamphleteers, and the greatest and most weighty of British newspapers, opened a year or so ago a fierce campaign against what they called “Municipal Socialism.” Never did so potent an army suffer so humiliating a reverse. On the progress of municipal trading the attack made no impression whatsoever. The public at large saw through the game and gave the public-spirited authorities their generous and energetic support. The municipal movement has received no check; it has gone on more triumphantly than ever. Energetic local bodies have pushed their activities further and taken the satisfaction of public needs more and more out of the hands of private speculators, vesting it in those of responsible public officials. But the opponents of municipalism are still active, clever and unscrupulous; and we cannot afford to leave the public interest at any disadvantage in dealing with them. It is unquestionably at such a disadvantage at present, partly on account of the inconveniently restricted boundaries of local areas, partly because of the anti-progressive bias of the Local Government Board, and partly because of the state of the law in regard to the powers of local authorities. The first point has been discussed so excellently by Mr. H. G. Wells and others that I need do no more than allude to it here; with the second I shall deal later. But the third is of special importance. In the present state of the law a private individual or a collection of private individuals may do anything which the law does not expressly forbid; but a municipality or local body of any kind may only do what the law expressly permits. Thus for instance the London County Council has by law the power to run trams, but when it attempted to run an omnibus line to and from its tram terminus, the private omnibus companies successfully invoked the law against it. This is absurd; it is intolerable that a public authority should not be permitted to supply what its constituents definitely demand without going to a largely indifferent and largely hostile parliament for permission to do so. Broadly speaking County and Borough Councils at any rate should have power to do anything that the nation through the national legislature does not definitely prohibit. It would be well for the Labour party in Parliament to demand a free hand for progressive municipalities such as can only be secured by legislation on these lines.