In 1887 Sir S. W. Griffith passed an amending and consolidating Divisional Boards Act in which many defects of the original measure were corrected. About the same time he passed an Act to relieve the Treasury from the excessive burden of the L2 for L1 endowment, which had been extended in 1884 for a second five-year period. Under the amended law only such sum as Parliament might vote in each year was to be rateably divided among all local authorities. After that time the endowment diminished until in 1893 it reached a very small sum. Afterwards the amount remained at about 6s. in the pound until 1902, when, in passing the new amending and consolidating Local Authorities Act of that year, the Philp Government made no provision for continuance of the endowment. In 1903, therefore, owing to the embarrassment of the Treasury in consequence of heavy deficits for several years in succession, the endowment altogether ceased, and since that time the Government have steadfastly refused to listen to proposals for renewing the payment, on the ground that each governing authority should raise its own revenue by taxation or otherwise, and not depend upon endowments collected by any other governing authority. The stoppage of the endowment was in some degree compensated for by the extension of the rating powers of the local authorities, but the exercise of these has no doubt accentuated the drop which occurred in assessment values after the crisis of 1893. Some councils, through failure to make use of their powers of rating, have had an insufficient income, so that in parts of the country the roads are now in a less traffickable condition than they were a quarter of a century ago. In other cases, however, the local bodies have so used the powers conferred upon them that they make no complaint of insufficient income. From the day of the presentation to Parliament of the Divisional Boards Bill there had always been an outcry, among the farming ratepayers chiefly, against the taxation of improvements. In 1890, therefore, after ten years' experience, the Government of the coalition, whose leaders had long been severed by difference of opinion on the subject of land taxation, perceived in a universal levy on the unimproved value, so called, a method of mutual reconciliation which would meet the demands of many true exponents of local government principles, and they agreed to introduce the new system. The "unimproved value" is by no means an accurate definition of what either the taxpayers or the Legislature at the time desired. But no one has yet discovered a more satisfactory definition, and therefore it stands.