It will be observed that although primarily responsible for public order, the Home Secretary is by no means a minister of the interior in the continental sense, for apart from the police he has very little to do with local government. The supervision of matters of that kind, although in part scattered among different departments, is mainly concentrated in the hands of the Local Government Board. The Home Secretary has, on the other hand, some of the functions of a minister of justice; and this will be referred to again when we come to speak of the Law Officers of the Crown. [Sidenote: The Board of Works.] The Board of Works is not regarded as a department of great political importance, and for this reason it presents one of the two or three cases where the minister has no parliamentary under-secretary. For a score of years the public lands and buildings were under the care of a body called the Commissioners of Woods and Forests; but in order to keep the revenue from land separate from the expenditure upon buildings, and so bring the latter more completely under the control of Parliament, the duties were divided in 1852. The Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues were made a permanent non-political body under the Treasury, while the Board of Works was established to take charge of the construction and maintenance of parks, palaces and other buildings. At that time many of the public buildings were, in fact, committed to the care of the departments that occupied them; but by a series of statutes these have now been transferred almost wholly to the Board of Works. Now, although the amount of money that passes through its hands is very large, the board is by no means entirely free, for without the sanction of the Treasury it can undertake no work not directly ordered by Parliament, and it can make no contracts for the erection of large public buildings without submitting them to the same authority,[107:1] which also appoints the ordinary permanent staff of the office.[107:2] [Sidenote: The Board of Trade.] The Board of Trade occupies, on the contrary, a position of great and growing importance. It has had a long and chequered history, and although in the course of its career it has lost duties enough to keep an active department busy, these have been more than replaced under that modern tendency toward state regulation of industry which is constantly adding to its burdens. It deals not only with trade, but with many of the chief agencies of trade, and especially with transportation. As in the case of the three other boards to be described hereafter, the Board of Trade is engaged not in direct administration, but in supervising and regulating the action of private bodies and local authorities, and in keeping a watch upon the enforcement of the law. Speaking broadly, its powers have grown by the process of making it responsible for the application of a great many statutes.