Although the improvement of Liverpool has been so remarkable, it is difficult to say to whom it is mainly due; there have been so many active public-spirited men who have given the best of their time and thought to the promotion of municipal undertakings. Liverpool has been fortunate in possessing so many sons who have taken an active interest in her welfare, and have done their work quietly and unobtrusively. The re-making of Liverpool has been accomplished in the quiet deliberation of the committee room, and not in the council chamber. THE TOWN HALL--ITS HOSPITALITY. The hospitalities of the Town Hall were in my early years limited to dinners, and most of these took place in the small dining room, which will only accommodate about forty guests. When the fleet visited Liverpool the Mayor gave a ball, but these occasions were rare. To Dowager Lady Forwood, who was Mayoress in 1877, the credit belongs of introducing the afternoon receptions, which have proved so great an attraction. The Town Hall and its suite of reception rooms are unique, and although built over 100 years ago, are sufficiently commodious for the social requirements of to-day. The late King, when Prince of Wales, on his visit to Liverpool in 1881, remarked to me that next to those in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg he considered them the best proportioned rooms in Europe. The Lord Mayor receives an allowance of £2,000, and is in addition provided with carriages and horses. In olden time this allowance was ample, but it is no longer so, and it is impossible to maintain the old traditional hospitality of the Town Hall unless the Lord Mayor expends a further £2,000 out of his own pocket, and many Lord Mayors have considerably exceeded this sum. It has often been urged that the allowance should be increased. I doubt if this is desirable. The invitations to Town Hall functions might be more strictly limited to representative people, or the entertainments might, as in Manchester, be placed in the hands of a Committee, but it must not be forgotten that more is expected of the Lord Mayor in Liverpool than in other places. He is not only the head of the municipality, but of all charitable and philanthropic work. The initiation of every undertaking, national as well as local, emanates from the Town Hall. All this throws upon the Lord Mayor duties which directly and indirectly involve the dispensing of hospitality, and I do not think the citizens would wish it should be otherwise.